


Seachange

by ellebb



Category: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: Awkward Flirting, F/M, Feels, Fluff, Miscommunication, Mutual Pining, Occasional angst, This is really a compilation of moments outside the main story, Trust exercises gone awry, UST, What a turn of events!, ho don't do it, idiots falling in love, liam character study, post-couch, the 'What?' 'What.' trope, things are gettin srs, twin angst, vandalizing the Tempest, venting by baking, you know the one
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-15
Updated: 2017-06-21
Packaged: 2018-10-19 01:06:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 23,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10628973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellebb/pseuds/ellebb
Summary: Liam’s clutching onto anything to keep from drifting off course.  Mira has no idea what she’s doing, or why anyone would put all this on her.  These are the moments inbetween, the soft moments (and the hard ones) that mean more to them than any battle.





	1. Freckles

The first day he meets her, her brother is put in a coma and her father dies.  Oh, and their “second chance,” their “new beginning”?  Completely fucked.  So not the ideal start.

But they all bought one way tickets, and yeah, all of this?  “Pathfinder” and all?  Not what she was expecting, but it’s what she got.  So he should do his bit to make it easy, right?  Least he could do.

“Okay,” Liam said, dragging the coffee table a away from the couch with a screech. “I’ve got a fix for your problem, Ryder.”

“And which one is that?  You know I need SAM to strategize the most efficient schedules for all my ‘ _problems_ ,’” Mira said wryly from storage’s doorway.

He sat on the table and patted the couch seat in front of him.  She didn’t move to sit, though.

“Not that,” he said. “More personal.”

She waited, still leaning in the hatchway, eyes skeptical.  He sighed-- or more like nervous laughed because one, she was pretty and that’s what happened with girls like that, and two, because he wasn’t sure yet whether he was overstepping his bounds.  But hey, nothing ventured, right?

“A trust exercise-- and before you start, yeah, they’re dumb and corny, but what could it hurt?” Liam said.

She finally moved, expression a little less skeptical, and leaned against the side of the couch where he didn’t have to crane his neck to look at her.

“Alright, I’ll bite,” she told him. “What personal problem do I have that this trust exercise will help with?”

He scratched at his neck.  Here’s the dangerous part.  Gotta be light on his feet or else blow ‘em off stepping on a mine.

“Well, maybe it’s more a problem we’ve all got.  The whole crew.  See, out there, with your gear on?  You’re golden.  Buuut, we’ve all just met each other, and I think it’s a little tough for you, right?  Bunch of strangers, all the responsibility yours.”

Her eyes lowered, looking at something in the vicinity of his boots.

“See?” he said. “That’s what I mean.  Eye contact.  You don’t trust us all yet, and that’s fine.  We’ll get there, but why not speed it up a little?  Starting here.”

She made a point of looking back at him.  Studied him.  Would probably try to find the right protocol log in the manuals to deal with him if she could.

She finally sat in front of him on the couch, their knees a breath away from brushing, and nervously tucked her brown curls behind her ears.

“Okay, what do we do?” she asked.

He grinned to set himself and her at ease.  With various success.

“Alright, Mira,” he said, pointedly using her name. “We sit here, and we look at each other.  Keep eye contact for five minutes.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

She exhaled, closed her eyes, and straightened her posture.  Shaking nerves or something out of her shoulders.

“Alright,” she said. “SAM?  Set a timer?”

“Of course,” SAM intoned, both everywhere in the room and nowhere.

Liam still got bugged out about that sometimes; forgetting that the AI existed for long stretches, getting reminded by him suddenly speaking up, and thinking afterwards about how he’d been observed the entire time.  Pathfinder probably didn’t have that luxury.  SAM was in her head, all the time.

She settled down though, into that crusty old couch, and looked Liam in the eye.

“Started,” SAM immediately stated at this.

Yeah, it was his thing, his suggestion, but Liam couldn’t help it.  He grinned as he met her gaze, giggled a little.  And that set her off: she smiled for the first time since she’d entered the room, her top lip attempting to suppress the upward curve of the bottom one.  It was natural: this exercise often started with the nerves and the laughter that came with it.  Because it _was_ nerve-wracking, sitting close enough to feel the brush of each other’s breath and looking right into each other’s eyes.

It made you feel vulnerable, and people so often try to cover that with humor.

She lost her fight against her own smile, and shifted.

“Hey!” Liam mock-warned her. “No looking down, remember?”

She said nothing, and that smile faded away to a fullness in the cheek and a sparkle in her eyes.  Shame.  It was a really good smile.  White teeth against peachy lips, amber skin, the quirk at the corner of her mouth.

His own grin faded after a moment.  It wasn’t quiet, exactly.  The hatch to the cargo bay was open, and Gil was tinkering on the Nomad, dropping tools and muttering to himself.  Vetra was out there, too, working on inventory logs or something, occasionally making a comment to Gil.  And the _Tempest_ always had this super low, almost sub-hearing hum, especially in the areas nearer to the drive core.  And when it got “quiet” you could hear a rustle of wind sometimes: the air filters doing their job, praise the Goddess or whatever.

Her eyes were dark.  Brown and deep.  Long lashes that you could braid, probably.  Dark, serious business brows that were somehow both in contrast to the soft roundness of her face and yet perfectly in place.  He watched those subtle movements of her eyes slowly blinking, the bit of furrow over the bridge of her nose, the way her cheeks worked as she shifted her jaw.

She had freckles.  Lots and lots of freckles.

(Note to self: don’t ever compare them to a constellation or some crap if you ever get the balls to actually hit on her.  Cheesy, awful stuff.)

(Addendum to note to self: he probably will anyways if he’s in his cups or something.)

Wait, what?

Liam forced down the self-curse that wanted to roll off his tongue.  Hit on her?  Him, Liam Kosta, local village idiot hit on the Pathfinder?  Hero of the _Hyperion_?  Heleus’s best chance at normalcy?  What was he even thinking?

And that was when he came back to reality, when she caught a hitch in her breath that washed over him like summer heat.  He only realized then that he’d been staring at her lips.  And she had noticed.

His gaze darted back up to her eyes.

They’d gone wide, wide and white.  And the message in them was quite clear: _what the hell_.

Shit.

Shitshitshit.

He wanted to grin and make some dumb joke, ease the tension.  But he couldn’t quite summon the humor, couldn’t quite take his focus from the dark bloom flooding all those freckles, and the way the two of them were really close-- like, really, _really_ close.  Like, feel the heat radiating off each other close.  And he could smell the scent of gun lubri-- _shit_ , fucking hell Kosta, do not think that word-- the scent of Initiative issued soap-- why again had he decided to wait until later this evening to use his shower ration?

And it was hardly fair, the way her lips parted just a little bit.

“One minute has passed,” SAM intoned.

They both jumped.  Broke eye contact, and jerked back up to reconnect.  Grinned sheepishly.

One minute, though?  Seriously?

Just one?

There was no way he could be feeling this constriction in his spine, and this growing tightness in his calves and thighs from just one minute.  No way his heart valves could be pumping like that, like prize-winners at the darby.  Constricting and bursting open at a neck-break pace.  Not from just a minute.  No way.

Liam stared back into the Pathfinder’s eyes, cursing himself and wondering how the hell he was going to last another four of these century-long minutes.

“Ryder,” Kallo’s voice suddenly blared over the ship’s comms, “There’s some undocumented Scourge in our trajectory.  I’m adjusting course, but ETA will be delayed.”

She leapt to her feet, mashing her omni-tool’s transmitter. “I’ll be up there in a sec!”

Relief flooded Liam’s extremities, making him feel all noodle-y.  And...  Regretful?  Uh, yeah.  A little regretful that she was going.

“What?  It’s fine, you don’t--” Kallo stumbled over the comms.

“In just a sec!” she repeated.  She turned to Liam with a sheepish smile. “Rain check?”

Her voice pitched.

He cleared his throat in a completely un-awkward way.

“Yeah, yeah,” Liam told her, making shooing motions. “Uh, yeah.  Uhm, good work, though.  Pathfinder.”

She was already halfway out the door, and smiled at him again over her shoulder.  Her eyes slid away from his, though.  Hah, what was that about good work?  But it couldn’t have anything to do with the way his own face had gotten all hot, and his head all swimmy.  Surely nothing to do with the way she’d seen him stare at those freckles.

Surely not.


	2. no u

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mira has to make her first decision about who to wake from cryo. She’s confused and worried. Liam helps.

“What about the lab technicians?  How long until production can start rising?” Mira asked. **  
**

“It would depend on several factors, Pathfinder,” SAM stated over her omni-tool.  Him using her internal implant still made her head ring sometimes. “First, there is the post-cryo acclimatization period which has varied widely among the current sample population.  Secondly, there will be varying opinions on what research projects to prioritize.  Finally, there is no way to predict the ultimate timelines of these projects.  There are too many variables to say for certain, Pathfinder.”

Mira deflated.  She laid back, the plates of her armor clacking as she flattened herself against the top of the Nomad.  An abandoned datapad sat beside her.  Her eyes clenched at the alien sun straight above her.  Eos’s radiation had come well within acceptable limits since accessing the vault, but the heat could still be overbearing.  She’d have to escape the exposure of sitting on top of her utility vehicle soon; there was already a few drips of sweat collecting at her temples.

Some yards away, the incoming and outgoing shuttles kept shifting the air pressure within the valley, the steep rock cliffs surrounding Prodromos shielding it from the broader menaces of the area.  Distant, unintelligible chatter of the colonists slipped to her through the clusters of prefab dorms, offices, and labs.  She could catch a few words, even under the whine and hiss of the shuttles.  “Acceptable risk.”  “Compatible compounds.”  “Digestible, but at what cost?”

The _Tempest_ shimmered over them all, like a great mirrored bird.  She shifted; one of her… _butt plates_ (there really was no other word for it) was digging into her crack.  She should adjust it when she got back onboard.

“Maybe special forces?” Mira asked. “The kett are a huge problem that’s not going away anytime soon.  And Prodromos is already geared toward science.  Or maybe recon?  I mean, I know I’m biased, but intelligence on kett movements and encampments would help a lot in protecting the colony.”

“I am afraid this is a matter you must decide on your own, Pathfinder,” SAM told her.

Mira sighed.

Who thought this would be a good idea?  Like, _really_?  Hey guys, let’s give the twenty-two year old Alliance grunt that tripped and fell face-first into this job complete license over the lives of thousands of people.  Deciding the best people to bring out of cryo, the best people to keep up the fragile momentum the Initiative now had?  Psssht, piece of cake for the Pathfinder, right?

Right?

“Ryder?”

Her eyes popped open.  She rolled over to peek over the side of the Nomad.  Liam stared up at her, shielding his eyes with a thick white glove.

“What are you doing?” he asked.  A smile crept about his lips and in the squint of his eyes.

“Um,” she said. “Meditating?”

She regretted the words the instant they left her mouth.  Ugh.  Ughughugh.  Why was she so, like, the complete opposite of witty?  This was why she was recon.  Give her an extended scouting and stakeout mission, any day.  A long waiting game behind a scope.  Anything other than having to deal with the way her tongue dried up and her skin caught fire at the sight of Liam Kosta’s face.

Especially when she was trying to be “Pathfinder.”

“Meditating?  Really?” he asked her, taking another step closer until he could lean his weight against the Nomad.  Except he said it like, ‘ _Reeeeaaally_.’  Annoying.  He could be so annoying sometimes.  Grinning like that.

She sat up, picked up her datapad, and jumped over the side of the vehicle.  She released the landing-tension in her legs, and pushed the datapad into his chest.  He glanced into her face, then took the pad from her.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“All the data on the cryo bays.  I have to decide on who to release.  And soon.”

“Hmm,” he hummed, scrolling without really lingering on the information.

Mira shifted.  They stood in the partial shadow of the Nomad’s enormous tires, but still getting a lot of the heat and glare of the sun.  All of the crew’s suits had internal temp regulators.  (Even Liam’s ballistic-weave, smart fabric gear.)  Still, their faces had a sheen to them.  She struggled not to get mesmerized by the trail a particular bead of sweat at his temple took, down his umber skin and over the hills of his cheekbones.  At least he was wearing a shirt.

But what was with the way he was clearly not looking at the datapad properly?  Was he seeing something she wasn’t, some obvious correct answer that had eluded her?  Was he trying to figure some polite way to tell her she was being an idiot?

Shit, why couldn’t someone just _tell_ her how to do this?

Liam glanced up at her.  He took in her expression, smiled, and leaned past her to place the datapad up on one of the Nomad’s tires. (Nearly pushing his ropey neck, and its scent of dirt and the field into her face, damn him.)  He straightened.

“Got a minute?” Liam asked innocently.

Mira cleared her throat. “Not really?  I have to decide this.  Like, soon.  What do you think--”

He waved his hands defensively around his chest. “Nuh-unh.  That’s above my paygrade, Pathfinder.  But maybe this will help?  C’mon.  It’ll just be a minute, and you’re clearly not making any ground worrying yourself to death on top the Nomad.”

She sighed and rubbed at her forehead.  She needed to rehydrate.  And the braids she kept her hair in while in the field were starting to itch.

“Okay,” she told him.

His grin broadened.  And before she knew what was happening, he’d caught up one of her armored gloves in his hands, his own gloves tucked into his waistband.  As he tugged her into a trot away from the Nomad, her stomach turned and fluttered.  His hand was large, and enveloped hers even with her armor.  Carelessly, blunt-cut fingernails.  A cut or two on his fingers from tinkering with tech.  And if she could feel his skin with her own, she’d bet there was a bit of roughness; gun and grenade callouses.

But after only a few steps, he let go.  Her stomach dropped.

Well.

Just as well.  Pathfinder business, right?  Big, important problems, right?  She couldn’t be dumb like this, getting distracted.

Ugh.

Sans-the hand holding, the two of them kept trotting to the edge of the valley, toward a staggering in the sheer cliff face.  Mira pulled up, avoiding the sudden heavy pressure and loud air blast of Liam’s jump-jets.  She glared up at him, orange dust and skree skittering around where he stood above her on the rock face.

“C’mon,” he called down at her.

Mira muttered to herself for a moment, but followed anyway.  Soon, they were several meters above the valley floor.  And eye-level with the nose of the _Tempest_.  She hadn’t noticed they were that close to the ship.

Liam cleared his throat, catching her eye.  He pointedly nodded his head in the direction of the _Tempest’_ s hull.  She looked at their ship.  Then at him.

“You can’t be--”

“You’re the Pathfinder,” he grinned, grabbing her hand again. “You can do what you want.”

“That’s not exactly--”

But she had to stop her protest as he bent his knees, preparing for the force shift of his jump jets.  She bent too, and then-- the thrust of their jets pushed them out into empty air, floating for just a moment.  Liam clutched her hand, and it wasn’t just the weightlessness, that totally brief divorce from the pull of gravity, that turned her stomach over.  It wasn’t just the jump that caught in her throat.

They landed on top of the _Tempest_ with a loud boom.

“ _Ryder_!  Again!?”

Mira let go of Liam’s hand, fumbling her omni-tool. “Sorry, Kallo.  Last time, I promise.”

Liam was snickering, so she punched his shoulder half-heartedly.  He shook his head and, still grinning, walked away to the other side of the ship.  Arrayed around them, nestled within the embrace of beautifully striated cliffs, sat the infant colony of Prodromos.  People-- humans and asari and turians and salarians-- walked between buildings, chatted in the shadow of eaves, lifted cargo from the shuttles.  Evening wasn’t that far off, and soon they’d all be gathering in the mess halls and private kitchens.  Chatting about the day’s discoveries, its trials.

She watched for a moment, aware of Liam looking at her.  Finally, she turned to him.

He was smiling.

And the sun’s reflection off the ship’s hull-- so merciless and vivid-- clung to the deep sepia of his skin, the broad nose, the lips always so generous with a smile or a laugh.  The light clung to his dark and coarse coils, to his black stubbled jaw, to his adam’s apple.  And, to her perception at least, the sun was all caught up in his accent; his dumb, terribly funny, and always honest turns of phrases.

“See?” he was saying to her, waving out toward Prodromos. “This was _your_ doing, Pathfinder.  Without you?  The Initiative would still be grinding itself down, burning resources, with no way to establish an outpost.  You made this possible.”

“You were there, too,” Mira stated, letting her gaze wander.  She made herself bring her eyes back up, though.  Eye contact.  Right.

He grinned, noticing.

But he went on without commenting, “Yeah, but without you… Look, Mira, this?  It’s _good_.  You’ve done good.  There’s so much more to do, but _you’ve got this_.  And we’re all behind you.” His own gaze slid to her again. “I’m behind you.”

A tension she hadn’t noticed, right in-between her shoulder blades, underneath her jump jets, released.  Just those words, and he’d undone something in her she hadn’t even known she’d needed.  Tears threatened to crawl up her throat.

He was looking out over the colony, all caught up in light and optimism and-- _goodness_.  That’s what he was, Liam Kosta.  That’s exactly what he was.

“Shit,” he said softly, smiling at Prodromos. “It’s beautiful, huh?”

“No, you’re beautiful,” Mira instantly said.

Liam’s head whipped around. “What?”

She stared back. “What.”

As he stared at her, what she’d said fully hit her.  Blood flooded into her face, and she did not ever want to know what sort of expression her gaping mouth and flown-wide eyes composed.  Liam’s soft smile had exploded into a broad grin, and she couldn’t stand it, so she slapped her hands over her face.  Her armored gloves no doubt leaving red marks.

“ _I don’t_ \--,” Mira stumbled, “I mean-- I didn’t say that--”

“I dunno, have you checked my medicals?  ‘Cause my hearing’s pretty good, and I could have sworn you said--”

“SAM!” she stopped him loudly, practically shouting.

“Yes, Path--”

“I meant SAM!  He’s beautiful!  You know, the blue sparkley orb thing.  It’s… It’s really… He’s really…”

She peeked over her hands and instantly regretted it.  Liam was still beaming at her, eyes totally reading: ‘ _You are so full of shit_.’

“Thank you, Pathfinder, I think you are beautiful as well,” SAM intoned with absolute sobriety.

Liam lost it.  And she could only glare at him full-out laughing for so long before she got all caught up in giggles, too.

Liam finally pulled up from where he’d been hunched over, helpless.

“Ryder-- you,” he wheezed, chuckling. “You-- You’re really, really bad at this.”

“Shut up,” she said, slapping his shoulder.

He only started laughing again.

Damn him.

-

“You thinnnk I’m beauuutiful.”

“Nope.”

“Yes, you doooo.”

“No.”

“You thinnnk I’m beauuutiful.”

“You’re fired.”

He just laughs.


	3. Patience

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the couch incident, things get awkward between Liam and Mira. He doesn’t know how to fix it, and plus he can’t get any traction on his efforts to make connections with the angara. Liam is just having A Very Bad Time.

At first, he thought he was imagining things. **  
**

After Havaarl, there was a lot to do to prep for Voeld and rescuing the Moshae.  So, yeah, maybe she didn’t have as much time to unwind on his couch with him, some vid playing in the background while they worked on reports and emails.  Maybe her avoiding the cargo bay and haunting the ops table almost around the clock was just anxiety about making nice with the angara.  Maybe the way she was too… _careful_ about the way she looked at him and spoke to him, handling each word and glance as if he were a mother-in-law or something-- maybe it was a side-effect of the job.

But he knew better.

He wasn’t imagining things, as much as he wished he were, and this all started a week ago the day after the couch hook-up.

Liam suppressed a heavy sigh.  Wouldn’t matter much anyway; he knew that the rest of the crew was already used to him being the loudest, most obnoxious bunkmate anyways.

Around him, the _Tempest_ ’s crew drifted on their own dreams during the dark quiet of the ship’s sleep cycle.  He had a bottom bunk.  Switched with Gil once the engineer complained he was worried Liam would toss and thrash himself over the side of the top.  It was stupid; not once in his life had he ever fallen off the edge of a bed in the middle of the night.  It had to be some sort of thing like how you can get so used to a sleep schedule that you wake up on time even without an alarm.  Your body knows its edges, its limits.

Except apparently he _doesn’t_ know where his boundaries are, ‘cause he’d clearly crossed one with Mira.

Liam kicked off his sheet.  The ship’s sanitized and cool air hit his bare chest, tickled his leg hair.  He only wore shorts to bed; he couldn’t stand the feeling of constriction with anything more.  His feet hit the chilly metal floor.  As he stood he glanced at Gil in the bed above him: the guy was a terribly light sleeper.  And the spawn of Satan, apparently, because he got up at, like, 0400.  On purpose.

Liam scratched at his chest idly, and pulled out the chair to the desk, grabbing his datapad.

_...sure their data would be helpful, but there’s no reason to believe we can’t reach the same conclusions independently.  In any case, our reserves are too precious right now to spread out to…_

_...offer seems well-intended, but forgive us if we are not eager to enter hasty agreements with…_

_...all very well, but you seem to have very little concrete support in your offers…_

_...hard truth is, we can’t stick our neck out for a people who are clearly endangered; an investment without security…_

“Investment without security” has got to be his favorite way yet for saying, hey, we really just don’t give a fuck about those other guys.

Shit, what was with people?  Seriously, what the actual fuck?  Okay, _maybe_ the angara weren’t expecting a hundred thousand (not even that, though, with the missing arks) new aliens to come knocking on their doors, but, hey, hello?  Nice, not-attacking-them people on the verge of starvation?  And, yeah, _maybe_ things were spread really, really thin in the Initiative.  Like, layer of oil slick thin.  Even so, they _had_ to make overtures to the angara.  They had to prove they were going to be good neighbors.  They had to prove themselves worth establishing an alliance with.  How the hell did anyone expect to push through the kett problem, and all the Remnant shit, otherwise?

Fuck.  It was just the same old shit, new galaxy.

Oh, some fuckwad with an EMP and an agenda wiped out power and water for an entire city district and you need emergency rations for civs?  Here, let me just make you jump through legal hoops for it.  Oh, this colony hit by slavers needs upgraded tech and defenses?  Sorry, they’re actually unsanctioned squatters, so they’ll have to fend for themselves.  Let us slap some fines on them for illegal occupation while we’re at it.

Oh, you’re a little kid that can’t help but get worked up at what may seem like dumb shit.  We’ll just label you a troublemaker, an idiot.  Ignore you.

Liam smashed at his eye sockets with the heels of his palms.

The glow of the crew quarter’s screens slipped through the cracks between his fingers, the light of the ship’s diagnostics, real time data.  It was blue and harsh and neon.  Brought angry tears to the back of his throat.

He was letting his head get away from him, he knew, but that didn’t change the fact that he was drowning in things that _mattered_.  These things _mattered_.  His concerns were legitimate (goddamit, they were), so he was struggling so hard to not blow up.

He could talk to Lexi.  He could, but sometimes that was just too impersonal.  Like, yeah, Lexi would sympathize, but she was trained to.  She was trained to fix _him_ , not the problems he was looking at.

There was Jaal, but the guy was still skittish about them.  Especially when you brought up something deeper than how do I call you a shit in Shelesh.  And that just fed the fire Liam wanted to put out.

He could run through the options all he wanted, but he knew exactly what he wanted right now.

He wanted to go to the hatch of the Pathfinder’s quarters, knock, and spill his guts to Mira.  He didn’t even want to touch her-- actually, no, that was a lie.  Yeah, he really wanted to touch her again.  Submerge himself again in her smell and the warmth of her arms.  Watch her again like that, released from her everyday bullshit.  Watch her release him from his own head.

But, even more than that--

He wanted her to be his friend again.

Not this weird no-man’s-land of not really friends, nowhere near lovers.  Not even strangers, new acquaintances.  Because he was good at that: making something good out of a ‘just met.’

This?  Fuck no, he was no good at figuring out what the hell to do to fix a relationship he’d obviously pushed too far, too soon.

Just.

_Fuck_.

-

Liam woke up with about three hours of consecutive shut-eye, a very angry and empty stomach, and a new determination to make the best of things.

Okay, so he was hitting some roadblocks with the angara contacts thing.  No big deal.  It was to be expected, really.  First contact was always bumpy at, y’know, first.  Hence, the ‘First Contact War.’  And the Krogan Rebellions.  He needed to be patient.  Yeah, yeah, ‘patient’ ‘Liam Kosta’ was an oxymoron but whatever.  He’d deal.  He had to.

Secondly, he and Mira had agreed to not let what happened get in the way of the mission.  But not to shelf the ‘ _them_ ’ thing just yet.  Apparently, she still found it awkward, so he’d just make an extra effort to reestablish the friendliness between them.  Make it easier.  Hopefully.

So he spent the morning banging around the tech lab.  He sent a mail to Mira asking her to meet him there, and tried not to take too personally when she didn’t show for almost an hour.

When she did turn up, she found him sitting at the work table, surrounded by various bits of armor.  And in his hands: her breast plate.  Which he was staring at.  Right between, the, y’know.  Breasts.

At the open hatchway Mira cleared her throat.  Liam jumped.  She was gazing at him with raised brows, and he realized what it must look like.  He coughed and put it down slowly.  He grinned at her.  Normal.  Totally normal.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey…” she said.  And she did that thing she’d been doing ever since… y’know: she automatically looked down, remembered herself, and looked up with a smile.  Except it wasn’t that broad, full-lipped smile that curled at the corners just so.  Her smile was tight now, anxious.  Professional.

Liam stifled his own nerves to swivel on his stool toward her.

“I’ve been thinking,” he stated, a tad too loud and too carefully. “Voeld.  Cold as a witch’s tit, right?”

Her eyes shifted back to the breast plate he’d put down. ‘ _Tit_.’  Goddamit, how did he keep doing this?  How?  It was a wonder he didn’t report to Lexi daily, no _hourly_ , for his own foot lodged down his esophagus.

“That’s what they’ve told us,” Mira said with that weird smile again. “Jaal gave us some data with more specifics.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Liam agreed quickly.  He waved at the neon holoscreens arrayed around his bench. “I’ve been looking at that.  Nomad’s got good environmental controls, but we won’t be sitting in it all the time.  I thought I’d go over everyone’s armor and run some tests.  See how the thermoregulators are functioning.”

She nodded her head, tucked brown curls behind her ears.  He tried not to think about taking that dark amber shell between his teeth.

“Good idea,” she told him. “You… started on mine?”

“Uhm,” he started, glancing down at her upgraded and modded Initiative-issue plates sitting around him on the bench on crates. “Uh, yeah.  I mean, priorities?  I-- because you’re guaranteed to have your boots in the snow right?  Not-- uhm.”

And she was looking at him, waiting for his mouth to stop spewing.

He tried again, “So, I’ve been running tests!  This Nexus stuff isn’t bad, but it could always use help.  Am I clear to tinker a little?”

“Sure,” she said, shifting on her feet and still smiling stiffly. “Anything else?”

“Well…” he paused. “Whose armor should I, y’know, prioritize after yours?”

“Definitely Jaal’s.  If he’ll let you.  Do the angara even need it, though?  He said they don’t feel temps like we do.”

“Yeah, something about their electricity thing.”

“Yeah,” she agreed.  And paused.  She paused for a significant moment, a hand rubbing at an arm as if already imagining the bite of the wind and ice ahead of them.

“Uhm,” she continued, “Talk to Jaal about his armor situation.  And.  Uh… yours?  If you’re feeling up to it.”

Liam’s stomach did weird things.  Flipped about and made him simultaneously want to be ill and fly about like a damn budgie.  So dumb, to be this moved over something as simple (and routine!) as getting put in the field at her side.  Stupid, but he couldn’t help the grin that spread over his face.

“Blowing up kett heads?  Daring rescue of a damsel?  Pathfinder, you shouldn’t have.”

He was grinning at her, his tone light and playful.  He fully expected the mood to transfer.  Lighten the weirdness.  But Mira just stared at him with an inscrutable _something_ going on behind her dark eyes.  The laughter dissolved on his tongue.  Shit, what was she thinking?  He wanted to know.  Badly.  He hated this not knowing and distance between them.  It was just… he thought they’d gotten close, that they were apart of each other, if even just a little bit.  And not just because of the sex.

“Just make sure you’re ready?” Mira said, expression unreadable. “And keep me informed about your work?”

Liam swallowed, nodded.

The tech lab door hissed quietly as she left.

-

He spent the day blaring music in his ears, running cold-temp stress tests on armor, and trying not to get worked up by the occasional unhelpful e-mail dropping into his mailbox.  And trying not to get overwhelmed by pessimism for both his professional (or “professional” in the opinions of others) and his personal life.

After staring at the data feeds he’d produced for so long that it all started to blur into a mess of neon blue hieroglyphs, he passed out.  Didn’t even register Jaal coming in to sleep in his cot in the lab’s corner.

Liam woke with a start at about 0500.  And woke Jaal, too.  Guy was still wound up around all these aliens, sleeping light.  Liam apologized for intruding in his space and left.

He wandered down to the galley and made the first pot of coffee.  Stuff wasn’t great, but it was growing on him.  Maybe eventually the scientists would figure out how to grow actual beans?  Maybe.

“Is that coffee I smell?”

He looked up.  Lexi stood in the hatchway, smiling at him for once.  She mostly made that ‘Kosta you are an idiot that makes my life difficult’ face at him.

“Fresh from the fabrication machines,” he told her, giving her a cheers gesture with his mug.

Ignoring his quip, she shook her head and went to the coffee maker. “Bless you.”

Watching her select a mug from a cabinet and pour from the carafe, Liam commented, “You’re up early.”

She glanced at him. “That’s what I should be saying.  I’m always up at this hour.  You aren’t.”

He shifted in his seat at the galley table and smiled over his mug, waiting for her to take her coffee and move on.  But she paused in the hatchway.

“Liam?” Lexi asked, head slightly tilted. “Are you having trouble sleeping?”

Her tone is that soft one, the doctory-can-I-help-you one.  And her eyes rove over him, picking up on his waxy, tired skin and inwardly-bowed posture.  He wanted some glib and funny defense to roll off his tongue, but nothing was coming to mind.  And maybe he didn’t really want to be deflective all that much.  Liam put down his mug.

“You got a minute?” he asked.

Lexi pulled out a chair across from him. “Of course.”

She rested her mug on the aluminum tabletop and leaned a little forward, all compassionate eyes and full attention.  It made him squirm a little, but no pain, no gain, right?

“Still not making much progress with the angara connections,” he told her. “And, yeah, I know it’s not all my responsibility--” Which he didn’t really believe and Lexi’s expression seemed to know that he didn’t either, “--but then, whose is it, then?  Someone has to start this.”

He fiddled with his mug and the doctor waited patiently. “It just seems like no one gives a shit, and I can’t understand it.”

Lexi propped her chin on a hand. “Liam, have you considered that your asking is worthwhile in itself?  I know you want real results yesterday, but that’s not exactly realistic, is it?  However, the fact that you’re passionate about establishing strong ties between the Initiative and the angara-- that speaks volumes.  And not just to me.  But to all the people saying ‘no’ to you right now.”

He shrugged. “Well, if they’re hearing, they’re still saying no.  What good is it if nothing actually comes from me shouting my bloody head off?”

“Liam,” she said, and her tone shifted to make him look up into her eyes. “I think you don’t hear this enough, but you are inspiring.  We will always need people like you.  Who care and are passionate and work so hard to make things better.  All of us on this ship need that.  Everyone out there--” She gestured vaguely at the hull. “Them too.  Even if they don’t realize it.”

He smiled a little at her, and felt the persistent tightness in his chest shift.

“Umm, another thing…” he coughed.

Lexi paused with her mug hovering, a brow raised.  And the look she gave him, eyes carefully attentive, made him think she knew exactly what ‘other thing’ he was about to bring up.  Well, whatever.  He didn’t care if the whole crew knew about his romantic misadventures (which they probably did), but he wasn’t sure how _she_ felt.

“I think I’ve really screwed things up with Mira,” he told her. “I mean, we… y’know.  And we agreed to not let it interfere with everything.  But it just seems like she’s just… finding it awkward and weird, and I don’t know what to do.  Like, should I just leave?”

Lexi’s eyes widened. “Let’s not be too hasty here.  I’ve noticed some increased tension between you two, but I don’t think it’s gotten to the point of reassignment.  Whatever’s going on sounds like some failure of communication, because I know you both care for and value each other.  I wouldn’t be too pushy in trying to ‘fix’ it, though.  Let’s just relax, Liam.  Let her work out whatever she’s trying to work out. But make yourself available if she wants to talk.”

Liam snort with a self-deprecating grin. “Be patient?”

She gave him a look. “I know how you so hate to hear that, but yes.”

He laughed awkwardly. “Uh, yeah.  I got it.  Stop being an idiot, Kosta.”

“ _No_ ,” Lexi stated firmly. “You’re not an idiot.  You just care a lot.”

He went in for a sip of coffee because heat was rising in his face, and he had a hard time taking stuff like that.  Lexi smiled and patted his hand.  And left, claiming something something kett dna synthesis something.

Liam spent a few more minutes in the quiet galley nursing his first mug of the day.

Turns out, new beginnings were a shitload work.  Who knew?

-

Voeld was colder than a witch’s tit.

It was kind of sad really: how fast he and Mira would jump from the warm and orange spheres of warmth around the Resistance heaters.  The modifications he made to their suit’s thermoregulators helped.  It was a tricky thing to set the sensors to a hair trigger in dangerously low temps, set off the little eezo drives to work at a furious pace.  And then to set a protocol to conserve power once temps endurable for their physical layers of ceramic and insulation were reached.

Blah blah blah, but it was still cold as hell.

Not moving made it worse.

That’s why it kinda sucked that they were camped out in the Nomad parked on a cliff overlooking a kett encampment, waiting to ambush a squad scheduled to land.  At least, according to an intercepted comm SAM had picked up on.  It had only been a half hour, but Liam’s teeth were chattering and his bits were trying to crawl back up into him.  He half hoped that Mira would just give up on popping the heads of this particular squad of kett and head back to Techixx or the Resistance base or, please baby Jesus, _the Nexus_ and its deliciously artificial spring humidity.

But Mira just silently shivered beside him in the driver’s seat, eyes behind the bluish plexi of her helmet rapt upon the scattering of kett ground vehicles and empty storage containers below.   _Recon_.  Endless stores of patience and all that, goddamit.

Behind them, Jaal delicately snored.  His immunity to the stabbiness of the ass-eating cold was becoming increasingly irritating to Liam.

“How’s your suit?” he asked her.

She glanced at him.  He couldn’t see her mouth behind the breather unit of his helmet, but he could see in the tightness around her eyes that her smile still hadn’t improved.  They’d reached Voeld a few days after he talked to Lexi, and Liam had done his best to keep up his friendliness whenever their paths crossed on the _Tempest_.  But he didn’t go hunting her down, gave her her space.  Maybe it helped?  Shit, he didn’t know.

“It’s a big improvement,” Mira told him, voice tight and high with cold.

He forced down the comment that wanted to roll of his tongue, pointing out how she was obviously still freezing. _Space, space_ he told himself.

Jaal whistled through his nose shrilly.

Liam snorted, bit his lip.  A long pause.  And he couldn’t help it; it was too fucking cold and he’d been too damn tense for too long.  He began to laugh.  It built until he was helpless with giggles, his side painful with sharp stitches.  Beside him, Mira caught his amusement.  She was laughing, doing that thing where she covers her grin with a hand.  Even though she had her helmet on, and even though it was really a crime against the universe at large to hide a smile like that.

Mira shook her head, inhaling sharply to recover. “How can he do that?  Just.   _Sleep_.  In this cold.”

Liam coughed. “I dunno.  Maybe he’s dead.”

She slapped at his shoulder.  Lightly, in that playful and completely not-serious scolding way she hadn’t done in forever.

“Don’t say that!” she told him. “That’s just what we need.  Oh, sorry, Evfra, we somehow managed to get your man killed, but you’ll still trust us, right?”

Liam chuckled. “Oh, sorry, Evfra, that thing about saving the Moshae?  Yeah, screwed it up.  You’ll still give us resources and seeds and shit, right?”

“I’m not playing this game,” Mira stated, turning back to the front view of the Nomad.

It gave him a good look at her profile, at the way her eyes crinkled in amusement.

Below them, down the steep vivid blue plunge of the cliff face, the kett camp showed zero signs of movement.  None.  Not even a little ankle-biting wraith spawn.  God, it was goddam cold.  The sky above hung heavy and thick with ice and snow, visibly hard with menace and gray.  But if he could take that little huff of lightness and happiness she made-- if he could just take that little morsel and run with it, he could perhaps believe that things would take a turn for the better.  That the next time he synced up with the _Tempest_ ’s QE comms, a friendly response to his overtures would be waiting.  That not everything was shit.

“Liam…” Mira said softly.  She was looking very hard out the forward window.  If he hadn’t been hanging on to her every gesture and word, he might have thought she hadn’t said anything.

She cleared her throat and looked at him.  Her dark eyes flickered over him, their depths saying a ‘talk’ was coming.

He made himself relax, loosen his shoulders, and turned to meet her gaze.

“Yeah,” he said.  Sort of a question, and sort of an acknowledgment.  Yeah, he knew.

“I--” she started. “I know things have been, like, weird.  It’s my fault, I’m sorry--”

She shook her head to stop him from denying it; he kept quiet but made a mental note to give back that ‘sorry’ as unnecessary.

“I tried my best to keep things like they were, to be professional about it.  But I suck, obviously.”

Another note to his mental list to refute.

Mira paused, her helmet’s breather filtering her sigh as slight and breezy. “I just-- I dunno.  I didn’t expect things to progress, y’know.  Like that.”

And her gaze flickered, uncertain.  He wanted very badly to interject and reassure her, but she quickly started again as if afraid that she’d lose her momentum:

“And I know I said I was good with things.  That we wouldn’t let this become a big deal or interfere with the mission.  I know I said that, but I-- crap, I guess I’m just-- immature or whatever.  I don’t know.”

She inhaled sharply.  Exhaled.  And she looked him in the eye, a lot of things contained in her gaze and all of them making him sweat and making his pulse jump and his throat tighten.

“I just really like you, Liam Kosta.  I really, really, really, really like you.”

Aw shit, how could she just punch him, full-force, right in the gut like that?  Just impale his heart with her words and stare him down.  Brutal.  Merciless.  Blood-thirsty.

And she just kept going, a rolling stone of feelings and words killing him, “And I’m not trying to pressure you or anything.  I’m not expecting a reply or a commitment or whatever.  I just-- things have been so weird and I owed it to you to just spit it out already, and I’m sorry that I’ve been kind of a jerk--”

“Mira,” Liam stated.

She paused.  Waited and watched him warily.

He shifted. “Can I hug you?”

She blinked at him.  Whatever she’d been expecting, it probably had not been that.  Her brows scrunched, and the muscles around her eyes (those freckled cheeks) worked over a myriad of emotions.  Tentatively, she nodded.

Liam reached across the Nomad’s front console.  It was weird, hugging in full armor.  Stuff banging and clacking about, hard edges digging in uncomfortably.  You had to be careful not to snag on a toggle or hook or something.  And it did not spark the same sort of warmth and closeness you got with the touch of soft cloth and real flesh.

But it was one of the best hugs he’d ever had, breathing in the incredibly cold and sanitized air from his suit’s filters and gripping onto multiple layers of ceramic.  Because underneath it all was _her_ and she liked him.

That’s all he needed.

The two of them stayed like that for a long time.  His arm folded over her back and feeling the rise and fall of her calming heart.  The transferred vibrations of her breath in the crook of his collarbone.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

She shook her head, a subtle shift into his shoulder. “Can you just do me a favor?  Don’t call me Pathfinder.”

He paused. “I can do that.”

Jaal cleared his throat. “I hate to interrupt a lovely and very important moment, but the kett shuttle is incoming.”

Liam and Mira jumped apart as if shocked.  They both coughed and lunged for their guns.

“Uh, good call, buddy,” Liam remarked, totally natural.

“Hmm,” Jaal hummed with a thread of amusement.  Ass.

In the rush of gearing up in the awkwardly small space-- elbows colliding and harried requests for scatter grenades and ammo from the back-- Liam caught her eye.

“Mira--” he started.

She shook her head, “Later.  Don’t worry, Liam.  I get it.”

He wanted to stop her, tell her, no, she didn’t-- but there were rounds waiting be burned and targets to burn them on.

‘Patient’ Liam Kosta?

Well.

Who the hell knows?


	4. Brownies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mira is second guessing herself over telling her brother the truth. And post-Voeld, and post-Aya outing, she still can’t be sure about where she sits with Liam. A weird emotional precipice they’re both balancing on.

She woke up with her lungs collapsing and her eyes burning with the neon afterimages of her father’s mouth moving, imparting words only heard by the void.

Mira struggled with her blankets, disoriented.  She breathed and her hands flew up to push her damp hair out of her face.  As she sat up, she balled up the length of her hair, pulled it away from her hot neck.  The console beside her bed read 0232, and the darkness of her quarters was barely broken against the shimmer of stars outside the broad windows.  Their light a faint memory from light years ago.

“Are you alright, Pathfinder?” SAM asked.

His vivid blue holo-representation on her desk had come back online, no doubt on account of her.

“Yeah,” Mira replied.

He could roll off her raised vitals, obvious proof contrary to her claim, but they’d gotten to the point where what is obvious doesn’t need to said.  It could maybe (possibly, improbably) even be called trust.

Mira kicked off her blankets and stood.  She threw off her heavy sweats, the _Tempest_ ’s constantly cool air grazing her bare chest, and pulled on a lighter t-shirt and shorts.  She put up her hair.

It wasn’t really Dad that was giving her nightmares; although, he was one reason.  One persistent, awful thing that always skulked around her head and reminded her that she was an orphan, that she was playing at being a being a hero, that she had never really known him--

Mira stopped that line of thought.

Everything sucked and she didn’t want to cry again.  But if she didn’t, it would just get bigger, and the crying harder.  But she couldn’t stop herself from stopping herself from venting.  She was a freaking trainwreck that kept wrecking and wrecking.

Mira went to her terminal at the desk to check her e-mail.  It wasn’t a cigarette, but one neurotic tic usually substituted for another.  She wished this was Mars, where no one cared if you smoked, and she could sit on the research center’s battlements, look at the bright dot that was Earth, and think about all the times she should’ve been better to Mom.  But Mira’d quit when they came to the Initiative, before the leap.  And she’d already had one ear chewed off by Lexi about her medical history; she’d rather keep the other one than start smoking again.

Vetra probably knew how to get human cigarettes.

No, no.

Don’t think about that.

Think about the real problem.

Deal with things.  Don’t let them fester.

...Or maybe write these e-mails.

Yes, good plan, great job, Mira.  You’re doing awesome.  Yep, you tell Evfra you’re glad the Moshae is settling in.  Write confident.  You’re the Pathfinder.  Angara probs can’t tell how young you are, anyways.  Yeah, you tell Tann you don’t care what he thinks about Kadara!  Yeah.  Except politely.  Professional!  That’s what you are.  A professional.  Yeah.

And then she started worrying about the time and what they’d think when they got these mails at the asscrack of not even dawn, and that was another thing to think excessively about.  So that was good.

And then a line, completely unrelated made her pause and she could hear it, clear as day--

_I don’t feel well._

And all Mira could do was stare at her hands, awash in the blue light of SAM and her terminal.  Her fingers curled in.

She had asked herself this a million times already, and she’d no doubt ask herself a billion times more: had she done the right thing telling Forta about Dad?  About Heleus?

_This… is a nightmare._

Exactly her thoughts, but she didn’t want Forta thinking that.  Not when he was so vulnerable… And just.  Pitiful.  Even if it was true.  But she didn’t want her brother worrying about that.  He needed to get better.

Mira’s stomach clenched, and her face got so hot.  And she knew her expression, she knew, was falling fast.

He needed to get better.  He just had to.

-

And that’s how she found herself in the galley, the little table in there covered in containers and canisters and vacuum-sealed jugs.

Mira scrolled down a datapad of baking recipes and tips, copying and pasting things she found relevant and making notes of her own.  She was no stranger to this process, but she had to be prepared.  This was a one-shot deal and once she started, there was no going back.

“Ryder?”

She looked up.

Liam stood in the galley hatchway.  Because of course he did.  The one time she ventured out into the ship without a bra, and he showed up.  And too late to pull down her hair-- but he hadn’t seemed to notice, and in any case, he looked like his mind was elsewhere.  His face was drawn and his smile was just… off.  Red rimmed his eyes.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey.”

And he studied her face, and she wasn’t sure it looked much better than his.

“Umm…” he started, hand coming up to rub at his neck.  His eyes darted down from her gaze to look at all the stuff she’d pulled out. “What are you doing?”

Despite herself, Mira’s chest ached.  After their Aya outing (after her disaster of a confession on Voeld), they hadn’t talked a lot.  About anything beyond some dumb B-list movie or the next mission.  They were still hanging again, yeah, but it was like invisible lines had been drawn at some point.  He seemed distracted and hyper-concerned about the condition of the colonies.  And that was one of the things that she loved about him: that he tried so hard for the sake of others.

So no, she didn’t want to take that away from him.  No, she didn’t want to force him into anything he didn’t want.  But was it really bad of her to want someone to confide in, like, really _really_ confide in?  Did it make her a shitty person to want someone to need to know how she (She!  Her!  Mira!  Ryder!) was doing?

Was it awful that she wanted Liam Kosta to ask her what was wrong?

Mira cleared her throat. “Making brownies.”

His brow shot up. “ _Brownies_?”

“Brownies,” she repeated, trying a small smile. “Um, I couldn’t sleep.  And I-- uh.”

“You bake when you can’t sleep?” Liam supplied.  He pulled the fridge open to take out a water.

Mira went back to her canisters of synth-flour and the jug of that weird asari native animal’s ‘milk’ that worked so well as an egg substitute.

“Yeah,” she said. “I mean, not so much since we got to Heleus.  Because, resources.  But at home I did all the time.”

He slid into a seat at the table, careful not to disturb all her ingredients.  Closer, she could see he really was puffy and red around the eyes.  She glanced back to her datapad.  That made her chest ache, too.  She wanted so bad to know if he’d been crying himself to sleep again.  If it was really a regular occurrence

But she was afraid to ask.  She was afraid he’d think it was weird, too soon, or worse-- tell her it was never gonna happen.  He knew what she felt about… all of, y’know, _them_ or whatever.  But she didn’t know what he thought, and this had gone on long enough (she had it bad enough at this point) that she was too much of a coward to ask.

Shit.

It just.  Sucked.

Liam chugged some water and considered her. “Don’t brownies take a lot of chocolate?”

Mira froze.  She glanced at him.

He looked back.  And then he broke out into a real grin. “You look guilty, Ryder.  You done something, haven’t you?”

She cleared her throat, tried to go back to her measurements and look natural. “Me?  No way.”

“Ryyyderrr,” Liam drawled. “You know you’ve a shit poker face right?  Terrible.”

She huffed. “Well, _excuse_ me.”

“Awful.”

She ignored him.

“Absolute shit.  Face it, Ryder.  You’re as transparent as plexi.”

She stuck her tongue out at him. “Y’know.  I was thinking of giving you first bite…”

He laughed. “Alright, I’m sorry for pointing out the obvious.  But you’re still sharing.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do,” he stated, winking. “‘Cause I’m cute.”

Then she laughed. “Whatever, Kosta.”

“C’mon.  Spill already.”

Mira glanced at him. “Don’t tell Vetra.  But I… ‘commandeered’ a lot of our chocolate supply.”

Liam whistled in admiration. “And blamed it on the pyjak.  Mira Ryder, _you rebel_.”

She laughed.  And he watched as she finally decided on her game plan for these impromptu, make-do brownies.  She precisely measured out each of her ingredients.  And as she turned the oven on and began to melt the ‘butter’ (actually a levo ‘cheese’ made by a dextro company that seemed confused about levo cheeses) and the chocolate, she did her best to ignore the way Liam watched her move around the galley.

To distract him (and herself) for a while, she babbled a bit about their chocolate.  It was really, really good stuff.  Like, nothing synth or vat cloned about it.  Rich and dark, it would probably cover up plenty of sins from the other elements.  Mira had Liam help her pour the melted chocolate into the rest of the wet ingredients while she folded it all together, and then the dry stuff.  While she gently did the final mixing, he stole tastes of the raw batter.  Which she ignored.

It was nice.  Middle of the night, had the whole ship really to themselves.  Making brownies.  It was… normal.

When she finally had the pan of dark batter in the oven, she nudged Liam into helping her clean up.  

As he closed up canisters, he said, “So.  Are these brownies ‘for two’ or are you sharing with everyone?  Because I _may_ know a good hiding spot.”

She paused from wiping down the counter.  She glanced at him.

“Actually,” Mira started. “They’re, uh-- I’m actually planning on vacuum sealing most of them and sending them back to the _Hyperion_.”

He put something back in the fridge, closed the door, and leaned against it to study her.  She studiously went back to cleaning.

“The _Hyperion_?” Liam asked.

She nodded. “Yeah.  Um.  Some for Harry.  Because, y’know.  He’s done so much for my brother… and--”

And she’d stopped cleaning, and she couldn’t look up from staring at her hands.  And her ears were ringing.

“Shit, it’s so dumb--” she gasped, and covered her face with those same hands damp with soap.

She felt Liam moving nearby, probably freaked by her sudden shift in mood.  But she couldn’t help it.  It just all came on like a tsunami.  Everything was just…

Mira pulled her hands down and choked out a wet laugh. “It’s really, really dumb, but I wanted to make brownies for Forta, because I don’t know if I did the right thing.  If I hurt him, and it doesn’t make sense.  It doesn’t make up for anything, but--”

“Hey, hey--”

And he took her into his arms, folded her into his chest.  Enveloped her into a warmth she so desperately needed and hadn’t been able to vocalize, even to herself.  And that was painful.  Goddam him but his goodness was so painful.  What she felt for him was painful.  And everything sucked, and all she could do was cry into his shoulder.  Clutch at him with twitching fingers, and sob.

And it was all new again, because their bodies knew each other but really didn’t know anything.  Were complete, utter, total, absolute strangers.  Strangers pressed again into embrace that _needed_.  They needed and needed and needed each other.  She needed him holding her against the aluminum edge of the galley counter, needed him holding her against the strength of her own feelings.

When she calmed down, she pushed back against him.  But not away from her.  She wasn’t nearly unselfish enough for that.

“Don’t say sorry,” Liam instantly said, before she could open her mouth.

So she just stared up into his brown eyes.  The wetness on the brown skin around his eyes.  He looked a sight, but no way could he look worse than she probably did.

“Mira,” he said.  And he leaned in to place his forehead against hers.  She closed her eyes.

He continued. “I think your brother knows what you feel.  He understands.”

“Yeah,” she whispered. “We made a promise-- when we were kids.  That we’d never lie to each other.  Twin promise.  Way more serious than pinkie promise.”

He made a small huff of amusement that tickled her lashes. “See?  There you go.”

The twin promises.  With all the gravity of blood sacraments, she and Forta had sworn to never forsake such oaths.  On pain of foregoing their desserts to the other for all eternity.  The never lying had mostly been deemed necessary when it was clear that Mom’s “I’ll come play in just a minute” had generally meant several hours later into whatever project she’d been on when she’d realized what she had told them, and when it was clear that Dad’s “I’ll be there for the holiday” had really meant he’d vidcall for about twenty minutes.  But Mira and Forta had never made such empty promises to each other; they swore to always be upfront, and hadn’t broken that record yet.

So what could she have done?

Even if it had upset him in that fragile state, what could she have done?

She shook her head. “But I can’t lose him, Liam.  If he’s gone, too--”

She stopped.  And he pulled her back in tightly.

“Yeah,” he said, his voice low. “Yeah, I know.”

And he understood.  She hated that he did.  Wished that he didn’t, but he understood.

The hug continued for a while, until her tears stopped and she stopped sniffing.  And the smell of sweetness and chocolate asserted itself more and more throughout the small kitchen.  Parading its deliciousness.  So Mira gently pushed against him and stepped back; Liam seemed to hesitate, but did let go.  And they had an awkward period where they didn’t know what to do with their hands without holding onto the other.  So she smiled sheepishly and wiped at her cheeks.

Liam cleared his throat. “Uh.  Just so you know-- that smells amazing.  Honestly, if I were coming out of a coma, brownies would be priority number one for me.”

She snorted and shook her head. “Jeez, you and Forta-- there’s no way I’m letting you two meet.  What a disaster.”

She was choosing for the moment to ignore the “if” in those statements.  If he wakes from the coma.  If he gets the chance to meet Liam.  Because the crying had made her body seem lighter, as if some part of the sadness dissipated through the tears, and the perfume of brownies had already smothered her cortisol and fired off her serotonin.  Seemed to, anyway.

As she bent to check on the pan through the glass door of the over, she considered her next words.  She straightened, tucked a curl out of her eyes, and considered Liam.  He sat against the counter watching her.  His eyes were still a bit red, but he generally looked better somehow than when he first came into the galley.

“Liam,” she said. “Sorry-- no, wait.  Sorry for dumping all that on you.”

He shook his head and shifted again, hands at his sides twitching like he was gonna reach for her again.

“No sorries. Really, Mira, you don’t need--  We’re…”

And when he trailed off, the light in his eyes flickering, she gave him a small smile.

“See?  We’re…” she pointedly trailed off too, and shrugged.

An idle hand mussed in his hair, as his brows drew in. “Shit, I-- Y’know, I keep dicking this up, I know, but…”

“Liam,” she stopped him. “I know.  We’re all just going in a bit blind.  For what it’s worth?  I’d rather have you dicking things up than anything else.”

That poked a laugh from him.  Quiet, and a bit awkward, but a laugh nonetheless.

With impeccable timing, Mira’s timer for the brownies went off.  They came out of the oven with an absolutely beautiful crackled chocolate crust on top, and the perfect amount of thick fudgy crumbs clinging to the eating stick she tested the center with.  She straightened from the pan with a smile.

“A success,” she declared.

Liam had been conspicuously edging closer the instant the pan came out. “So?  You promised.  First taste.”

She smiled at him and rolled her eyes.

Somehow, they ended up sneaking back into the cargo bay on silent tiptoes, the brownies carefully hidden beneath kitchen towels.  And they laid out in storage, continuing the twenty-first century drell drama they’d started the other day and eating out of the warm brownie pan with two forks.  At some point around 0600 they passed out, nestled against each other and most of the brownies devoured.

Sometime later, Harry Carlyle received a package on the _Hyperion_.  Two vacuum-sealed containers, incredibly tiny, with a note from the pathfinder.  One(1) brownie for Dr. Carlyle, to thank him for his work, and one(1) for Forta Ryder, once he finally got his ass out of bed.  Chocolate rations being what they were, sorry there wasn’t more.

Harry wasn’t complaining; it was a very good brownie.


	5. Orbit is a Synonym for Falling

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Liam has impulse control problems, we know this. He thinks it might be a deal breaker (yet somehow it still doesn’t deter him??)-- spoiler: it’s not.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think this might be a good time to mention that there are no foreseeable plans for the rating to go up. Bc reasons. Thank you~~

It’s not like he went out of his way to put himself in danger. **  
**

Okay, _maybe_ there’s a bit of untruth in that statement, but look.  He couldn’t help being ‘on’ all the time.  He’d tried to switch to ‘off’ before; after all the parent-teacher meetings, the lectures, the hospital visits.  The girlfriends that got fed up with his bull.

He didn’t _mean_ to scare people.  If he’s being honest, sometimes it surprised him when others were concerned about his well-being, when they got angry on account of it.  It’s not exactly the caring that surprised him-- more like, oh, shit, I should have considered that first.  But it was hard to think first when a clear goal sat in front of him, and the direct, simplest route was totally possible.  It just happened that most of the time that direct route was the nutty one.  The one most likely to put him in a cast or break a rib.

And the other times?  The ones that weren’t, y’know, life-and-death situations?

Well.  Nothing ventured, nothing gained, and a laugh was a helluva gain in his opinion.

And having a guy like Jaal around?  Damn, if they don’t have some fun on this constant world-shattering hellride, well, they’d all go bonkers, right?  Or Liam would, anyway.  Jaal was the same.  Yeah, at first the guy was trying to be all tough and suspicious or whatever, but they all warmed his little angaran heart.  Not a small part of which was on account of Liam, of course.  Duh.

So they had fun.  Risked life and limb.  Whatever.  So sue them.

“So, that is ‘dextro’ food,” Jaal stated, staring into the contents of the fridge.  Liam peeked over his shoulder.

“Yeah, that’s Vetra’s stash,” he agreed.

“And turians and quarians are the only dextros from the Milky Way,” Jaal reiterated.

“Yeah.  I mean, as far as I know?”

“And ‘levos’ cannot consume the same food?  Does this also extend to production?” Jaal mused, continuing to stare intently at the innocuous sealed tub of food.  Chilled air began to permeate the rest of the galley.

“Umm,” Liam hummed. “I don’t really know?  Drack and Mira use the same pots don’t they?  I think they do something when they switch?  Uhh.”

“I mean, with regards to mass production.  Are there separate ‘dextro’ and ‘levo’ factories?”

“Okay, that one’s filed under generalist-specialist info,” Liam quipped, clapping the angara’s shoulder.

They’d come to recognize that some questions during all this cross-species cultural exchange were just beyond a single individual’s experience.  That stuff they called ‘generalist-specialist.’  Or: I have no fucking clue and don’t really have an inclination to find out.

“Hmm,” Jaal just mused.

They kept staring into the fridge.  For whatever reason.

Liam cleared his throat. “Are you daring me to taste it?”

Jaal finally glanced at him and frowned. “I never said--”

“‘Cause if you’re daring me, and you think I’m not gonna do it, you clearly don’t know me well enough yet.”

Jaal looked at Liam, and his silly grin.  And he looked back at the tub of dextro food.  And he looked back at Liam.

“That is extremely stupid,” Jaal stated. “Aren’t you afraid one day Lexi will just stop treating you?”

“So what you’re telling me,” Liam said, nudging the angara out of the way, “is that you’ll let me wear the rofjinn for a whole day if I do this?”

“What?  No!”

“Deal!”

And even though he made his disgruntled remarks about the human’s intelligence, Jaal (with not a small amount of curious light in his large blue eyes) watched Liam pull the tub out and drop it loudly on the counter.  He started pulling out little individual containers full of things he half knew the names of, half had no idea how could even be digestible.  That was when Mira stepped through the hatchway.

She stopped in her tracks, and Liam froze with a large morsel of a brownish dextro _something_ halfway to his face.

“What are you doing?” the Pathfinder asked, brow lowering.

Liam wasn’t sure what exactly overtook him at that moment.  It was like just the sight of her turned on that particular switch that was already always set on a hair trigger with him.  Oh God.  Shit shit.  It was fucking stupid, but there she was: cute as fuck, and looking at him, and yes! Give! Me! Your! Attention! Mira! Ryder!

Liam jammed his whole damned mouth with that chunk of dextro-whatever.

And it didn’t taste bad.  Sorta pudding-like texture, which wasn’t exactly great cold, but it had a brown gravy-like thing going on.  And.  Like a weird beer-y, fermented, fatty pork thing?  It wasn’t terrible at all.

“Oh my god,” Mira gaped. “Liam, don’t swallow that--”

And really, it wasn’t funny.  It wasn’t funny at all.  But he had an ultra intense impulse to laugh at the face she was making, all horrified and open-mouthed and stuff.  But he didn’t laugh.  Oh no.  That might actually be funny-- him laughing and the disgusting result with a mouthful of food.  But no, not Liam Kosta.  He’s never satisfied with just the straight gross-out joke.

Liam chewed for a good moment (“Stop, seriously!”) and he swallowed.

All the while staring her down.

Jaal made a sound half-way between exasperation and a laugh. “That was very stupid.”

Mira slapped her hands to her face, probably struggling with the exact wording for her incoming outburst.  Then she lowered her hands, and her face wasn’t the mask of anger and irritation he was expecting.  She stepped forward, grabbed him by the wrist, and tugged him out the galley hatchway.

“C’mon,” she sighed.

“And, no, you still can’t wear the rofjinn!”

And in the short walk down the hall to med bay, Liam was already getting short of breath, his throat tightening painfully.  Mira’s hand was firm on him, and he couldn’t help staring at her expression.  There weren’t storms in her eyes.  No furious squall, but a dark indrawn… something?

It was hard to think with his entire mouth on fire, though.

Lexi took one look at them from her desk, sighed, and made a straight beeline for her supply cabinet.

“I take it all that swelling is an allergic reaction?” she said dryly, facing a wall of little bottles and medical things.

“He got into some of Vetra’s food,” Mira replied.  They were talking about him as if he were some kind of dog.  She kind of pushed Liam into an examination table, which he hopped on easily.

His feet swung, and he was reminded of being a little kid.  Mum dragging him to the doctor’s and holding his hand, promising a lolly if he would just sit still for one goddamed minute.

Mira didn’t exactly hold his hand, but she did keep close to his side with her fingers on his forearm.  His head was starting to swim.  Yet he could still distinguish the knit in her brow.  He wanted to poke it.

While he was busy staring at Mira’s face and fantasizing about poking it, Lexi poked _him_ in the thigh with a very sharp needle.

“Oww!” Liam tried to complain, but he mostly brayed like a moose.

And the fingers laid lightly on his forearm (those thin fingers with the trigger callouses) tightened.  They didn’t grip or dig in, a painful and visceral reaction, but just momentarily closed around him.  Held onto him.  As if afraid of what would happen otherwise.  It lasted only a millisecond, and she let go, resettling into her light brush across his skin.

What was _that_ about?

He swiveled to look at her, but Lexi pushed him down into the bed, giving him her standard scolding for the umpteenth time.  She threatened to tie him down if he wouldn’t stay put while the injection did its work, and plied him with some mystery white tablet.  Mira let go of him at this point, which made the absence of her hand burn.  Pathfinder duties or something.  He caught a last glimpse of her, glancing back at him, as she exited the med bay.

He turned to see Lexi giving him a very pointed, very knowing look.

“Wha?” he asked, tongue thick and useless.

“I’m trying to decide if you’re trying too hard or if you aren’t trying nearly hard enough,” she informed him sharply.

He sighed, which caused him to choke sharply on shallow breaths.  Fully exerted, he lay back limply on the examination bed and tried to ignore Lexi’s judgment.

-

She doesn’t wear the name ‘Ryder’ for nothing.

It would surprise anyone that had only met her off the field, that had never seen her work (her being a bit of a mess out of her armor-- well.  In civvies, not-- uh, you know.)  But she knew her tactics, had incredibly agile ‘battlefield intelligence,’ and he’d once watched her clean up an entire kett squad at two thousand meters.

Plus there was SAM, so in general the _Tempest_ ’s squad felt pretty comfortable with letting her make the calls in the field (giving allowance for occasional ribbing).

And that was exactly why Liam should not have broken formation.  He’d gotten his though.  Served him right, he guessed.

He recovered from the self-poisoning pretty quickly.  Spent the night in med bay fiddling his thumbs and vegging out to a series of vids on his omni-tool, then bound out the next morning with a sincere promise to take the little bottle of tablets Lexi gave him as instructed.

They were running ops on Kadara, some of it dodgy stuff like sifting through the bullshit between the Exiles and their top assholes, trying to find the kernels of truth through all the-- you know-- shit.  Once it was clear he was no longer slurring around a swollen, foot-sized tongue, Ryder pulled him and Peebee out for the final push to activate the next vault.  They made good time in the Nomad, mostly avoiding trouble when they could (which was always Mira’s style, frankly) until they encountered a gang of trumped up bandits who thought a roadblock and a few pistols entitled them to your shit.

Should have been a quick clean-up, but it turned out that this particular gang had a skilled engineer with them, probably ex-infrastructure or something from the Nexus.  Anyway, this jerkoff techie kept alternately throwing these annoyingly small and agile drones at them and then handing off portable turrets to his assfaced friends so that they could place them somewhere incredibly inconvenient for the Pathfinder’s squad.  And, cherry-on-top, this engineer was hunkered down behind the roadblock, completely inaccessible to their bullets.

They could turn around, try another way.  But they were already on a delayed schedule for their mission to board the Archon’s ship.  And every minute, every day wasted made it more and more likely that something would go wrong, a leak would weasel its way over to the enemy.

Liam watched all this go through Mira’s eyes as they continued to trade fire with these two-bit fleabags.

She made an angry, frustrated grunt over the comm.

“This is a freaking waste of time!” she yelled.

“Yeah, no shit!” Peebee answered, blue force thrown from her fingers to pluck up a raider.

Mira went quiet for a moment, fiddling with something on her rifle.  With an _oomph_ , she slid away from her position against the cover of the Nomad.  Liam was too busy taking potshots to watch what she was doing.

“I’m going up the ridge under cloak; flank ‘em and take out that engineer,” she announced. “Maintain this position.”

“Roger,” Peebee called, relief flooding her voice.

“Make it hurt,” Liam added.

She didn’t say anything, and he didn’t see her leave the immediate area.  Kind of the point.  He had no reason to worry; this was exactly her kind of thing, the maneuver she honestly liked to use the most.  And it was routine.  There really, absolutely, was no reason to get antsy or start getting smart ideas.

And yet.

This was Liam Kosta.

He and Peebee spent a few moments working on a real cockroach of a turret that seemed made of, like, magical phlebotinum or some shit.  Until Liam got kind of sick of it and had A Very Bright Idea.  Really, all he needed was a beer to tell Peebee to hold.

“You think she’s on the ridge yet?” he yelled.

“What?” the asari answered distractedly.

“ _You think she’s on the ridge_ \-- Nevermind.  You got this for a minute?”

He didn’t wait for a reply.  Instead, Liam Kosta, ultragrade genius, pulled out two fistfuls of grenades, set off all of them, and hurled the bundle of carnage and mayhem at the raiders.  And he bullrushed through the resultant upwaft of scree, debris, and dust, towards a set of crags on the other end of the shallow valley they were entrenched in.  He ignored the outraged protests Peebee shrilled at him and hoofed it as fast as he could.

“ _Liam_!” Mira’s voice rang over the comm. “What the hell are you--”

“Distraction!” he yelled back. “Or flanking!  All of the above!”

Except it turned out that his plan b was not the Very Bright Idea his brain had told him it was, and he should have left well enough alone and kept his ass glued where it was.  Long story short: it was a fucking mess.

His grenades shielded his sprint across the field, but they also obscured visuals for both Peebee and Mira.  When things settled back down, the raiders quickly realized their squad was completely split and fanned out to pin each individually.  Mira finally got that annoying engineer, Peebee managed to gun and blast her way to Liam, and Liam made a whole lot of noise that mostly pushed all these filthy Kadara types back to their blockade.

It was ‘ _mostly_ ’ because, while he was striking what could only be termed an omni-tool bitch slap on one raider, another appeared out of nowhere and scored a glancing hit with his shitty jerry-rigged rifle on Liam’s shoulder.  He swore, and lifted his own gun-- only to watch as the turian’s throat exploded with a viscous spray of blood.  Mira’s work, without a doubt.

By the time they were mopping up the last stragglers, his suit had already internally sprayed a disinfectant on the wound and was patiently pinging him to do a field repair for the perforation.

And when they were back in the Nomad, and the adrenaline from the firefight had worn off, Liam finally became aware of the searing sharpness radiating from the wound.

“This location isn’t secure, though,” Mira was saying. “I don’t have time to deal with curious scavvers.”

He glanced over at her.  She was already starting up the Nomad again, gasing forward.  She seemed to be in conversation over a private line, her eyes staring through the vehicle’s port at some point in midair.  They hadn’t exchanged much words beyond ‘How bad is it?’ and ‘Not too much.’

“Okay,” Mira said, and then switched tones to address him and Peebee. “We’re heading to the vault; it’s not too far.”

During the ride, the Nomad’s interior mostly filled with Peebee’s pointed passive-aggressive remarks about humans and their impulsive natures.  Which Liam countered with a long, detailed list of the asari’s own incidences of impulsive behavior.  Peebee eventually just blew a wet and deafening raspberry at them, and with her sitting behind them not a little spit hit his hair.  Which he complained about.  Loudly.

But the entire time Mira kept her mouth shut and her eyes on the road.  A weird feeling in his stomach kept building, and the pain shooting out of his shoulder wasn’t easing up.  He resisted the urge to look over at the bullet graze; he’d take care of it later.

But, shit.  If he were being honest, he really, really needed Mira to say something.  Yell at him.  Shit, he hated this sort of thing.  The waiting, the silent tension.

When they reached the vault entrance, Mira parked the car.  She swiveled to look back at Peebee.

“Go on ahead.  Need to do some first aid.”

“‘First aid’?  Is that what they’re calling it these days?” Peebee smirked.

“Wh- _Peebee_ ,” Mira sputtered. “Just go on.”

“Alright, alright.”

As the asari jumped from the Nomad with all her gear thrown over her back, Mira turned herself around to go scrambling in the back for the first aid kid.

“Sooo,” Liam tried, stifling his nerves. “That was Lexi earlier?”

“Yeah,” she answered and settled back up front with the kit in hand. “She was looking at your suit’s biosensors.  You’ll need stitches, but I can do a field butterfly for now.”

She popped open the little aluminum case on her lap, and then looked up at him.  Her dark eyes studied him over the breather unit of her helmet.  She had on the ‘professional’ face; the one that threw him for a loop, because it differed so much from her usual, so easily flustered one.

“Well, you’re gonna have to strip,” she told him, waving vaguely at his chest.

“Oh-- yeah,” Liam coughed.

_Don’t laugh, don’t flirt, don’t make the joke, our cams are on observation--_

“Are you at least gonna buy me--”

“Liam.”

“...Right.”

They managed to get him undressed to the waist, but only after a lot of quiet swearing and they had to pop open the wing doors to make enough room.  He had to rotate in the seat to give her access to his right shoulder, and she was sitting backwards and really close, his thigh lightly leaning against her thigh.  Her reaching across him had her helm so close, his breath occasionally ghosted across that blue translucent surface.

And he couldn’t tell what she was thinking just by looking at her eyes looking at the nasty gun graze on his shoulder.

When she was finished with the dressing, he was really bursting at the seams with all this silence and uncertainty.

“Mira,” he said. “Look, about before--”

“Later,” she cut him off, putting up the first aid kit. “We’ll talk about it later.”

And before she dropped over the side of the Nomad, before she even finally turned away from him, her eyes rove over him, seeing who the fuck knew what.  Saying, with her gaze, who the fuck knew what.

And he wished he was the fuck that knew what to say to her.  Just him, just this dumbfuck right here.

-

Back on the _Tempest_ , Lexi sewed him up and chewed him out.  And he may have exited the med bay at a jog.  He wasted some time in cargo chatting with Gil, all the while wondering when exactly the ‘later’ she’d mentioned would come around.  When a message from her popped up on his omni-tool, Liam didn’t even say good-bye to the engineer-- just walked off in the opposite direction with Gil calling annoying jibes at his back.

He walked to the pathfinder’s quarters with barnacle-thoughts growing on him like: _Please don’t yell at me_ and _Please just yell at me already._

He reached her door, exhaled heavily (‘Alright, go and take it like the experienced adult disaster that you are; not like you’ve never done this before.’), and the hatch hissed open before him.

She sat at her desk, back turned to him and reading some mail off her terminal.  Her hands were scrunching at her hair with a towel; she’d already washed off the residue of the vault’s killer fog and the sweat of running and gunning all day.

“Just a second,” she called to him.

He hadn’t been in here often; they mostly stuck to storage.  Her quarters were just… awesome though.  Plenty of space, big bed, nice couch.  The view.  The whole cluster, just lined up there for your perusal.

He dropped into the sofa and watched her.  And when she finally looked up, and finally stood and threw her towel over the back of her chair, and finally sat across from him-- he felt like he’d eaten a whole bucket of that weird piggy dextro pudding stuff because his chest was tight and there seemed a shortage of oxygen in here.

“Okay, Liam,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

And he could breath again, thank goodness-- this, he could handle.  He knew how to do this.

“Right,” he sighed, raising his hands-- as supplication or explication, it was hard to tell. “Look, I know I screw up a lot.  Like, a lot.  And I _know_ it seems like I’m not trying, but really I am-- and you know, I mean, _I_ know that it hardly makes a difference if I just keep pulling the same shit.  But.  But-- I mean, I guess I can’t really explain _why_ this keeps happening; they’ve tried to tell me-- Look, I promise--”

“Liam,” she said.  And when it was clear his momentum wasn’t permitting him a pause, even for her, she tried again. “ _Liam_.”

She took his hand into her own.  And that made him shut up, her skin still warmed from her shower and clinging to his.  And the awareness that she smelled clean and good.

He forced himself to look up at her again, meet her gaze.  The serious attentiveness of her dark, round eyes on him.

“I didn’t say ‘What’s wrong with you,’” she stated.  Her hand squeezed his. “I said, ‘ _What’s wrong_?’”

He used to know this guy back in sixth form whose dad had a hobby flying those old mechanical planes.  With like, the two wings and everything. Once, he got to ride behind his friend’s dad, his cheeks flapping in the wind and his stomach leaping pleasantly every time they did some nutty loop-de-loop or whatever.  And he’ll never forget that feeling when they kept rising and rising, the earth a distant memory, and this heaviness in his ears _popped_ and his head felt a bit dizzy but _better_.  You can’t get that in modern ships with the mass effect stabilizers and all.

But he remembered that feeling clearly, and recognized it as a lot like what he felt now.

Except on a ridiculously expanded scale.

That pop and that relief and that disorientation times a _million_.

That’s what she did to him, what she had him feeling.  And so it was that bit of dextro food all over again, with his throat closed up and his chest tight.  Mira had her eyes on him, so concerned and as calm as the stars.  So he needed to say something, anything.

“I’m sorry--” he started, but she shook her head.  He tried again, “Are you sure?”

“I wouldn’t be sitting here asking if I wasn’t,” she said softly.  And she still held his hand.

He ran a thumb over her skin, needing that contact, that tactile thinking process.

Liam swallowed. “I guess-- shit, I don’t know.  I’ve always been like this.  Maybe different place, different people.  But you know, always.”

“And… this particular place and people?” she asked.

She was asking for something specific, and as he watched, her eyes careened and if he pushed his fingers up just millimeters, he thought he’d probably feel the flutter in her heart through the pulse in her wrist.  And in the heat that rose in both their faces, he knew she probably needed to hear the thing he needed just as much to say.  Acknowledge.

He breathed. “I guess… Lately, I think I’ve really needed something from you.  Your attention, your regard.  I think I… I’ve gotten to the point where I need you.”

She exhaled, her lashes fluttering.  Shifting, she leaned back against the couch, and he had to fight the urge to follow her.

She gazed at him. “Can I show you something?”  When he nodded, she swiveled to look at the monitor on the wall across from them. “SAM, play back my helm cam footage from the last mission.  Fast-forward.”

“Yes, Ryder.”

Her screen was mounted a lot farther from her couch than his, and it was a lot smaller, but even with SAM speeding through the recording, it was clear what she wanted him to see: if she did not have a target on sight, then eighty percent of the time her gaze was gripped by _him_.  Her helmet turned to watch him load-up on grenades, kid around with Peebee.  Stared at him, his back turned, silhouetted by the lucid Kadara sun.

Her camera trailed after him, following, persistent.  Orbiting.

When her hand squeezed his, he turned back with his eyes like saucers, he knew-- and she shifted forward, gentle rustle of her shorts sliding across the couch, and placed the other hand on his cheek.  Her body shifted the pressure between them, even with an eternity of space still dividing them.  Strands of damp, dark hair swung close with their shampoo smell.

“Liam,” Mira whispered, gazing at him. “You always have my attention.  I’m always looking.”

And she hesitated.  Hesitated on the next words that she maybe wanted to say.  He didn’t blame her; he’d hardly given her much foundation to take the next leap.  Her eyes lowered, lifted again, and he couldn’t ever get enough of that face.  Dark honey and amber.  All rounded and softened.  Her fingers burned his flesh where she touched his cheek.

Her breath dropped, and she lifted from her seat on the couch, moving closer and her intention clarifying.

“Yes…?” she asked, so quietly.

He answered, simply and in his opinion best-ly, by surging forward and kissing her.

It wasn’t the first kiss.  Far from it.  And it was his biggest hope that there would be plenty more.  But if there were, and if he could he would etch this in his heart (maybe tattoo, at some point?)-- if he did end up lucky enough to have another kiss after this, and another after that, and another and another-- he would do his best to make each and every single one as good and meaningful and world-shattering as this one.

She bent into him, bent backwards and forwards like she’d already been by him and his shit.  But there’d be more-- god, would there be more, just please, please, stay like this.  Too good to him and too able and willing to go through it with him.  His throat was tight, yeah, like it had been since the day he met her, but it itched with hot emotion too.

Freely, impossibly invited, his tongue slipped through.  Sweet and warm and bitter acid of another person’s mouth.  Her hands flew up to clutch at him with fingers biting into his back, at the base of his neck.  His lips moved, in that awful and painful way that was too much and not enough, against hers-- a tidal motion, a dance of Scourge that ate and ate and ate.

And he was bending into her, whether by the strength of her sniper’s fingers pulling him under or by his own volition-- it didn’t matter, ‘cause he wanted all of it.  Fuck some of it.  He wanted all of it and then some.  Everything.

She parted from him, gasping, (a sharp little inhale, that’s all) and that sound went straight to his pants.  Somehow one of her legs was scrabbling for purchase along his side, and his hands were pushing along the bare skin of her back, threatening that t-shirt.  And somehow it was only his clinging to her that kept her from falling back into the couch-- orbiting is just the act of perpetually falling, and he was sure Sir Isaac Newton had been a psychic because he’d always be orbiting her, falling into her for an eternity and may death do us part.

When she sort of rose up though, to press into him, Liam’s thinking processes came back online.  He slowed down the ferocity of the face-devouring and slid his fingers down from their dangerous path.

Sensing his shift, she paused too, and drew back.

Neither of them could summon the amount of brainpower for words, glazed-eyed and swollen-lipped.

She slid back from him (how did she get into his lap?), pushing damp hair out of her flushed face and off her neck.

“Umm…” Liam attempted, a sheepish hand coming up to cover his sheepish grin.

“Yeah,” she said, too quickly. “I mean…”

“Yeah,” he repeated.

Although what the hell that meant, who the fuck knew.

She was further away, but her legs still rested around his; and he should move, but he really, really didn’t want to.

He tried again. “Uhm.  I hate myself for saying this, really, like it’s crazy difficult-- but I think we’ve already put the pedal to the metal enough?  Maybe, like, take it slow?”

She blinked at him; probably because he was speaking with the most obvious reluctance ever.  She snorted, grinning, and looked down.  All freckles and-- _fuck_.

Mira glanced back up. “Yeah.  I think that’s, like, a good idea.”

He deflated. “Well, shit, now that _you’ve_ said it…”

She laughed outright.  And he laughed too.

They ended up staying in her quarters, watching a vid just like any other night.  And yeah, it was predictable of them, but whatever.

They had exactly what they needed.


	6. Shanxi

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Before the Archon flagship mission, Liam gives Mira a gift.

“I need to go for my run.” **  
**

“Nooo.”

“I’m being, like, serious, Liam-- I gotta go.”

“Nooo you don’t.”

And despite her protests, Mira sputtered with laughter when his arms just tightened around her and he nuzzled into her neck, his coarse black curls tickling her nose.

“What’s the obsession with running, anyway?” he murmured.  She could feel the curve of his smiling teeth against her throat. “Who’s chasing you, Mira?  Whooooo?”

The vibration of his question _really_ tickled against the tender spot at the base of her neck, in that little hollow-- the, and oh god, it was almost too embarrassing to even think it-- the little hollow meant for catching kisses.  As he liked to say, anyway.  Idiot.

Wonderful, ridiculous, marvelous idiot that was _hers_.

They were entangled in the remains of her just-the-size-for-two bed, and he had her pinned with his delicious dark brown skin and his smile and his warmth and his smell and-- and, this was the kicker, this was the thing that would surely be the death of her, the thing that was the most difficult of all to resist: her own resistance to that cold, filtered air outside their little bubble here in these sheets.  That _other_ world that wasn’t just idiot A and B, that _wasn’t_ black coarse curls tickling her nose, the scent of him (always full and real, never artificial), and tender hands running down her side.

And the way her skin responded, in a tidal wave of goose-bumps and raised hairs, was so awful and amazing and terribly, terribly addictive.

Liam pushed up, and he nuzzled along her throat, under her chin.  The feeling was _good_ , yes, it was _good_ and please let this moment go on forever.

His lips whispered across her chin, and then he paused to look down at her.  His hand came up to gently brush at the hair at her temples.  Brown eyes gazed down at her, and she really, really liked the version of herself reflected there.  She liked the way she was when she was with him.  She liked being the person that was so loved, and so ready and willing to love him back.

He shifted, and bent down to kiss her,  He stole her breath and the warmth of her lips, and she’d give it again a million times over.  Shit, she loved the way he was solid and heavy on her, yet his lips were chapped and soft.  Caressing in that way that was perfect.

She was silly-grinning when he pulled up, and he was too.

“C’mon,” he murmured. “Stay.  No work today, just this.”

Mira chuckled a little and reached up to run her fingers along the side of his face. “That’s cute, but no.”

And she hated herself for it, but she wiggled down and rolled over to the side of the bed.  Liam flopped in the warm spot she’d vacated and groaned.  She slid over the edge of the bed and stood, hiding the small smile she wore.  And it burned her face up, but she made a conscious effort to ignore the way his eyes no doubt followed her naked body around the room.  Serves him right, payback is a five letter word, etcetera, etcetera.

“C’mooooon,” he whined.

“No,” she stated flatly, only the barest curl of a smile in the her voice. “But I like that you’re asking.  It’s flattering.”

She got dressed, pulling on leggings and a sports bra.  He kept quiet, maybe watching, maybe half-drowsing and tempted to fall back asleep.  Plucking up her running shoes, she sat on the edge of the bed.  Within his reach.  Fingers brushed her spine as she laced up.

She smiled over her shoulder at him.

Real time talk: she had never been anywhere near as gung-ho about Andromeda as Dad or Forta.  She’d been reluctant, even.  But right now she’d travel another million billion trillion light years across the blackest, loneliest dark space if it meant she’d keep ending up with Liam Kosta in her bed.  Smiling up at her like that.

“How can you even be up for a jog?” he asked, with his eyes, like, _twinkling_. “Didn’t you get enough exercise last night?”

“Hmmm,” Mira pretended to think. “Well, yesterday I did kick a lot of ass at _footy_.”

“Ooooh, ouch,” he laughed.  The burn seemed assuaged, though, as she swooped in to peck him on the forehead.

“Go back to sleep,” she told him.

“Not happening; I just watched you get dressed.”

“Then get out and get to work, crisis specialist.”

“ _Bossy_ , I like it.”

Sputtering, she laughed.  Her face was heated in a kinda pleasant way, and everything felt light and good and positive.  

“See you later?” he asked.  His thumb ran over her hand, across the thin skin over her knuckles.

“Yeah,” she said.  But she didn’t move.  Because of course she didn’t.

He tugged at her arm, and she fell into another kiss that threatened to erase any sense of time.  And his fingers kept pressing into her spine.

She made herself break apart, made herself ignore his puppy eyes, made herself leave the room at a trot.  But making herself wipe the dumb look off her face?  Nope, nosiree.  Not happening.  She was lucky she didn’t meet anyone on her way to the cargo bay.  They’d shove her into Lexi’s for a psych check.

She was just putting her earbuds in, thinking about which playlist to use, when she got called at from the walkway above the cargo bay.

“Mira-- just the pathfinder I was looking for!”

She looked up. “Hey, Gil.”

Gil waved, totally at ease and definitely not on a hunt for her or anything.

“Is it urgent?” she asked.  She was mentally prepped to run, and hated interrupting that.

“Kind of,” he said.  He still leaned against the gallery railing, the total picture of laxness.

She resisted the impulse to swear, and trotted to the ladder, taking the rungs at pace.  She wasn’t really irritated, truthfully.  So it shouldn’t have surprised her that when she gave Gil her good morning, he raised his arms defensively and stooped.

He made a hissing noise and mock claw motions. “Eek!  It burns!  Her got-laid-face!  It _burns_!”

“Oh, shut up,” she said, smiling broadly and lacking any venom whatsoever. “And you don’t know anything.”

“I know I wasn’t terrified about Kosta thrashing his own ass out of bed and, like, out of an airlock or something last night,” Gil shot back.

She shook her head.  Still smiling.

“And,” he added. “I know that he hasn’t been whimpering as much lately.”

“Ooh,” she said, hands flying up to cup her cheeks.

“Oh, for-- She’s _ooh_ ’ing,” Gil cringed. “Please don’t.  I can’t even hardly stand the amount of sugar in just your face right now.”

“Then maybe don’t tell me sweet things?” she said and poked him in the arm. “Or be a sweet person?”

“Lies!  Blasphemy!  Slander!”

“Fine, Brodie.  Resist the compliment.  But I’m gonna keep trying.”

Shaking his head, he laughed. “Okay, okay.  Serious talk time now.”

She’d been holding her earbuds, but tucked them behind her into her waistband.  She raised a brow at him. “I’m listening.”

“So that kett transponder?  I finally tinkered it into submission,” he said, turning to one of the side stations he had set up outside of engineering.  

She tensed, but followed.  Even with the switch in the conversation, she’d still had the traces of her smile in her face, yet she felt even that melt away.  Right.  This was a thing she’d had Gil doing.  Tampering with kett technology to reverse engineer the location of the Archon’s flagship.  So they could infiltrate it-- her and her squad, alone on a purportedly Everest-class ship full of hostile aliens.

She remembered herself, though, and put on her professional face while Gil explained the transponder, and SAM interjected about the reverse tracking.  And she did her best to ease Gil’s anxiety about, you know, boarding a freaking kett ship.

“You don’t look very sure,” Gil told her, eyes widening.

“What!” she exclaimed, trying for casual humor but hitting closer to nervy loss of pitch control. “Gil, I’m very sure.”

“Okay, maybe I’m not that experienced with, like, military-- um, ops?  Is that-- is that what they call it?  But isn’t the leader or, or CO _panicking_ a bad sign?”

“I’m not panicking,” Mira told him, internally panicking. “You’re panicking.”

Gil blinked at her, his face frozen.  The pair of them had gotten so high-pitched that they sounded like they’d been inhaling straight helium.  Mira’s gut roiled, and her palms got damp.  Guilt caught in her throat.

“Look,” she said, forcing her voice steady. “We’re fine, Gil.  We’ve all trained for this, and we’re all ready.”

“Okaaay,” he said slowly. “If you say so.  Pathfinder.”

She nearly deflated at that word.  It drove her nuts sometimes, because for nearly two years it had meant ‘Dad.’  Experience.  Control.  Not, a part of her own identity.  If it was that.  It was almost like she was the wolf in the story, running around in Grandma’s clothes, risking the lives of everyone.  Not just her crew, either (which was bad enough), but the colonists, too.

But she put on her professional face, smiled at Gil, and told Kallo over the comm to set a change in course.

-

As she hit 8 kph, the black band of the treadmill flying beneath her, she thought about Shanxi and her father.

He liked to tell this one story, and she thought now it was because it was meant to mean something for them.  Her and Forta.  Samurai bestowed the clan’s suit of armor to their heirs, a reminder and a means of protection.

Alec Ryder had been a hotshot, one of the first through Relay 314.  Though it wasn’t called that at the time.  Not on their side.  When the turian patrol fleet burst through the relay, raining down weaponized orbital debris on the Shanxi colony, Alec Ryder had been in the thick of it.  At one point, some important brass got pinned in a remote location, and Dad was sent to unpin this guy.  Extract him.

Well, the turians caught on and blew the remote location to smithereens right as they stepped out the door.  But the enemy only had tacticals, or they would’ve all already been nuked to grease stains.  And the abandoned outpost in front of them had options in cover.  Big brass is hurt, passed out, so Dad had command.  He looked out at his options, flak and dust buzzing around him and his squad silently shitting themselves-- and he made a decision.

He chose a point of cover, and ran.

And he did this not once, but countless times.  They didn’t have artillery, no heavy weaponry, no nothing; just their personal arms and a prayer.  Had no damn idea whether his choices were right, or if he was running straight into death.  Over and over, Alec Ryder chose a point of cover and ran for it.  He lost a good fraction of his squad.  But big brass got extracted, and eventually air relief did come in.

Point was-- even if the chances are terrible, even if it seems impossible, even if you are afraid-- the decision must be made and the action taken.

Mira’s chest heaved and her lungs worked furiously as she ran, suspended on her treadmill.  And she thought about Shanxi and her father.

-

As she toweled off from her post-workout shower, her omni-tool pinged.  She reached for her clothes and said, “SAM?”

“Message from Liam.”

“Just a sec.”

Dressed and clean and her hair blow-dried, she pulled up the message while stepping back out into lower deck’s hall.

_Got a surprise for you.  But you need to work for it.  I’ve left some notes for you around the ship.  Hint: use your scanner._

“Oh no,” she whispered.

She glanced up and down the hall.  Nope, just her and SAM.

“SAM?” she asked.

A pause. “Liam has asked me to ‘keep it a secret’.”

“And you’re going to listen to him?”

“I would like to,” SAM stated.

She closed her eyes.  SAM so rarely expressed personal preferences, and she generally considered each a victory for his… finding himself, or whatever.  She sighed.

“Okay,” she resigned herself.

Business first, though.  Or.  Kind of first.  Consecutive?

Whatever-- she went up the ladder to the top deck, and beelined for the tech lab.  Jaal stood at a work table, tinkering with a project, but looked up as she came in.  She asked if he’d received any new data on kett ships or kett blueprints from the Resistance.  No, nothing new about the ships; what they already had was already rare and hard come by, so to find anything new… But there were some new analyses on kett architecture, what with the recent pushes against them, so maybe SAM could do something with that?

“I will run some conjectures,” SAM stated.

“Right, thanks, SAM,” Mira answered, looking vaguely up like they were all somehow conditioned to instinctively do.  She glanced around the lab.

Jaal tilted his head. “Would you like to stay and chat?”

“Oh, no.  Thank you, but I’ve got other work to do,” she said.  Not the work station, surely?  Please, not the work station.  The cabinets?  Maybe the cabinets.

Jaal was still looking at her, his, like, brow area drawing in in a knit.

She waved vaguely. “I just, umm.  I need to do some scans on the ship.  We’ll be getting some close proximity to the Scourge, and-- uh.  Don’t let me bother you.”

“Alright,” he said slowly, turning back to his project with a little glance over his shoulder at her.

She kept a lid on the exhale she wanted to release, and looked around.  Turning her scanner on, she did a sweep over the general area, roving the fan of orange light over the floor and cabinets and walls-- and she nearly had a heart attack when the scanner found on the wall directly behind Jaal, in big bolded writing: _ur booty is AMAZING._

Choking, her throat strangled a laugh that want to burst out of her.  Jaal turned around, and her hand flew to turn the scanner off.

“Okay, great talking to you Jaal, see you, bye!” she said too loudly, too fast.  She sprinted out the door.

Holy shit, she was going to kill him.  Or, no, Kallo was going to kill him.  Vandalizing the _Tempest_.  Except.  Maybe not.  Because it was kinda… funny.  And cute.

Across the operations table, through the hologram floating there, Cora gave her a look.  Mira tried to temper the silly look on her face.  Success: minimal.  Giving up, she cleared her throat and walked purposefully to the bio lab.  It was blessedly empty.  She scanned down the narrow room with its ferns and-- um, non-fern plants.  Then, underneath the desk, against the wall, she found a second note in the same large writing: _u r sooooooooo hott._

With two t’s!  Two of them!  Count ‘em!

Crouched to where she could peek under the desk, Mira clutched her mouth to stifle the sputtering giggles.  Oh, god, she had to get her shit together.  Important things were happening.  Damn him and his-- his dumb notes being all… whatever and stuff.

She managed to collect herself enough to go to the bridge and discuss the new course with Kallo.  Of course, what her face looked like was probably not ideal, but Kallo was too polite to say anything.  But then she got to talking with him, about the Scourge, and she remembered the _Nexus_.  The deaths on entry to Andromeda.  Jien Garson.  

She kept talking with Kallo, knowing she kept making replies, but her thoughts drifted.  Her mind see-sawed between moods.  She felt vaguely sea-sick.  Not in her stomach, though.

Eventually, she went to her e-mail terminal, feeling blank.  Still, she remembered and got a feeling.  Suvi and Kallo were talking, something something dark matter.  She flipped on her scanner.  And he was so predictable, or maybe it was her?  The easy to read one?  Anyway, there it was, written on the metal panel next to the terminal keyboard: _i like ur face._

She wanted to laugh.  It made her feel good.  It did.  But maybe it shouldn’t?  Things were… Well, things were always something.  So, would it be okay?  Just this once?  Just this?

She glanced at Suvi and Kallo; still not paying attention to her.  So she slipped into the airlock, looking.  The loadout wall had been organized recently.  The guns gleamed.  She scanned.  And she snorted; he thought he was sooo clever, putting it there underneath her favorite rifle in a space nearly too small for his overlarge handwriting: _for real. you are gorgeous._

And she couldn’t help it.  It made her smile.

She went to second deck and got spotted by Lexi in the hall.  She had to submit to a pre-mission check-up.  While poking and prodding and measuring her, Lexi asked her searching questions.  Mira knew what it meant; she was taking a psych temp.  And honestly, she didn’t mind it too much.  She liked talking with Lexi, but right now she still had that non-physical sea-sick feeling.  She was still thinking.

Escaping the doctor’s clutches, Mira returned to her sweep over the ship.  In engineering, she found it, blazoned across the back of one of the very important-looking terminal stations with all the very-important looking data feeds and knobs and whatnot. _u smell good._  Gil would love that if he ever spotted it.  She hoped he didn’t spot it.

In the cargo bay, she got waylaid by Drack and his gleeful expounding on getting to take the ass-kicking to those ugly kett bastards right on their turf.  Which turned into several of his long war stories, and his detailed descriptions of just how to rip off a kett plate.

In the armory, after a conversation with Vetra about a ship that may or may not be waiting for a signal for any salvage that may or may not fall off this whole Archon flagship deal, Mira discreetly scanned around.  Jeez, he was way braver than her, putting it on one of Vetra’s crates.  Or just brazen.  Or trying to needle her.  Honestly, those two.  Worse than Kallo and Gil sometimes.

But there it was, in his invisible ink or-- what the heck did he use to write these, anyway?

_i’m better because of you_

“Something up?” Vetra asked, behind her.

Mira whirled. “Nope!  Just.  There’s gonna be, um.  Scourge.  You know.”

“Uh-huuuh,” Vetra said slowly.

“Okay, so see you later!”

And she wasn’t sure what she should worry about more; that she was apparently apart of some contraband ring, or that her face might freeze in one of these stupid looks.  Maybe the biggest issue was that she wouldn’t mind it-- her face freezing that way, that is.

In storage, on the shipping container turned coffee table, he’d scrawled: _i want u all the time_.

She raised a hand to hide her smile from no one.  Nobody was in there with her, to see her looking at the dumb, old, gross couch.  It was so dumb.  So… frat-y, and such a hormone-crazed, teenage thing.  Even so.  It warmed her, made her knees weak. _i want u all the time._

On a hunch, she left storage, waved at Drack and Gil at the railing above the cargo bay, and made down the hall.  Her scanner quietly ting-ed as it turned on, the fan of orange light humming quietly.  Underneath the ‘Pathfinder’s Quarters’ painted across her room’s door, in that glowing handwriting, he’d written: _i need u._

She turned off her scanner.  Her throat got a lump from somewhere.  Looking down, she toed at the textured metal deckfloor, her sneaker swiveling.

“SAM?” she asked quietly.

“Yes, Mira?”

“He did all this while I was running?”

“Yes,” SAM stated. “I would check your quarters.  There is one more message left.”

Blinking away the heat rising in her face, she tapped at the door panel.  It slid open silently.  Everything was pretty much as she left it this morning.  Except his clothes weren’t on the floor, and he wasn’t in the bed.  In fact, the bed had been made up.  Which was nice.  She never made the bed.  She didn’t think he did either.  So it was nice.

On the bed, very obviously laid out, was a datapad.  She sat down, sinking into the mattress, and picked it up.

_Mira-- I don’t know how to show you a fraction of what you make me feel.  I’ve been thinking, and I don’t think familiar is just ‘familiar.’  It’s home.  It’s safety and warm and it’s what I get with you.  Just please remember I’m always behind you, and not just because I’m always looking at your ass.  Heart emoji, heart emoji._

Mira laughed abruptly.  And wetly.  She reached up to wipe at the wetness on her burning cheeks.  Looking down at the datapad resting on her lap, she thought about Dad and Shanxi.  She thought about her crew.

She was scared shitless.  This wasn’t defending against raids, or even just routing an enemy presence in a lab facility.  This was boarding the leader’s home.  The flagship.  And she couldn’t say for certain if it was worth it, if it would pay off.

But that didn’t matter.  Her feelings about it didn’t matter.  She had to look ahead, because the way behind was blown to smithereens, and she had to choose a point of cover and run.

And when she got all sea-sick and paralyzed because she was afraid?

Well.  Liam Kosta thought she had an awesome booty.  When she was in the open, with no artillery, no nothing-- she could always find cover with him.

Sniffing around her smile, Mira furiously rubbed at her cheeks and eyes.  She got up to go look for him.


	7. i don't think tigers came in packs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the Archon’s ship, Mira declares a need for a break. She and Liam go out on the town in Kadara Port, and later Liam bonds with her brother.

After a week of Lexi regularly taking her aside for exams and searching questions, various crewmembers giving her the sad are-you- _sure_ -you’re-okay eyes, and a generous helping of his own need to cling and reassure himself of her alright-ness– after a week of this treatment, and a week of her own nightly wrestling sessions with the covers and invisible dream world enemies, he shouldn’t have been much surprised when she marched into crew quarters and announced:

“I want to get wasted.”

Liam looked up from his backwards seat in the quarters desk chair, in mid-conversation with Jaal.

“Oh… kay?” he said.

The hatch hissed behind her. She dropped on one of the bottom bunks and slung her legs out. She didn’t exactly glare at them, but a low-set brow intensified a stubborn sort of burn gleaming in her eyes.

“You. Me. Tomorrow night, Kralla’s Song,” Mira told him.

“Sounds intense. Should I wear armor? Pack medigel?”

She wrinkled her nose at him. “C’mon. Please? You owe me a date.”

He coughed, heat rising along his neck. “I didn’t say no– I mean, yeah. Of course.”

His hands tapped at the back of the swivel chair he sat in, and his eyes skittered over the room’s contents. He’d been finding it increasingly difficult to, uh… deal? With her? Or not really “deal” with but, like, say no to her. Or really, not say “no” but like…

Shit, it was hard to explain.

He’d gotten pretty cozy in her quarters lately, claiming a spot for his pillow and his own side of the bed. She’d cleaned out one of her clothes drawers for him. His hair stuff was sitting on one of the tables by the couch, and on most hair-wash days he’d sit on the floor against her knees as she helped him detangle and treat his curls. They’d put something on the tv and maybe even get halfway over his scalp before he got bored and started poking and tickling her legs and feet. And maybe, just maybe, she’d even finish and get all the gel and creme off her fingers before his hands got bored of just teasing.

So they’d gotten cozy, yeah. But since the Archon’s ship he was afraid he was going overboard. He’d tried to make the joke at first, but he knew he’d said it with gritted teeth and a queasy stomach. He got sulky when she didn’t bring him planetside. Tried to do work onboard the ship and couldn’t focus. He wasn’t remembering it, but she’d said he’d been dreaming again, clutching her. Shaking and muttering.

He didn’t tease as much lately, found himself more concerned than anything, foisting those Lexi-esque questions on her himself. Handling her with kid gloves, reverting back to those days when he still called her “Pathfinder.”

No wonder she needed a break.

“You just gonna hang around Keema’s?” Mira said.

Leaning against the wall near the desk Liam sat at, Jaal shrugged. His shoulders went rigid and his brow-area lifted in the way that said he was struggling with disdain. He sniffed.

“Most likely.”

“You’re free to stay here.”

“No, I’ll–” Jaal inhaled, the perfect picture of benevolent tolerance. “I will go.”

Liam coughed to cover up a chuckle.

“So, Kralla’s Song? You picking me up, or am I coming by yours?” he said.

That knit in her brow relaxed, and a smile flitted over her face. His chest thumped.

“We’ll play it by ear,” she told him. “Make sure you come thirsty because I’m not letting you get away with any one and done crap.”

He smiled. “Whatever you want.”

She paused at that, refocusing on him. Her eyes darted away as she cleared her throat. Haha, he’d got her. It was _stupid_ fun, all this going back and forth with the smiles and the hot skin and the shy eyes. Scary and exciting, addictive.

“Make sure you take sidearms,” Jaal warned them.

“Thanks, mum,” Liam said. “Will do.”

-

Not gonna lie; going out into Kadara Port without his armor and the greater part of his arms made him sweat a bit.

He had to watch himself so that he didn’t mutter about how he needed to relax ‘cause no one here would know he used to be a cop. Did his best to look comfortable in civs and with only a pistol on his hip. Things had somewhat settled down since Keema Dohrgun took over the port and made nice with the Initiative, but slap a paint job on a jalopy and you just get a nicer looking jalopy. Liam still didn’t like the den of scorpions. In contrast, Mira seemed much more relaxed out of armor, with good shoes on and a determination to drink.

He couldn’t tell if it was optimism or naivete or what. After Umi threw three whiskeys at them (one she downed right off and the other two they took to a table), he told her so.

She shrugged, stretching into her chair. “I dunno. It’s not much worse or anything than some hole in the wall in a lower ward. What sort of places did you go to in London?”

“Well, the team got around, right? There was this one time in Rio with this place where the dj and the dancers were all up on trapezes. The music: surprisingly awful.”

She laughed and maybe it was a pity laugh, but it still made him feel good.

He grinned and nursed his drink. “The absolute worst, though, was this sulphur mining colony that spent their evening sitting around their warehouse– their _sulphur_ warehouse that smelled of _sulphur_ – passing around a medical-grade container of watered down ryncol.”

“Oh man. Once this place I went to had a Tuchanka night– yeah, I dunno either– and a special on these drinks: ‘Rite of Passage.’ Club soda, simple syrup, bitters, and a drop of ryncol. And mint. You’d be surprised how awful the mint ended up being. _Never again_ , though.”

“The mint or the ryncol?”

“Whaaat? Excuse me, mojitos?”

He laughed. “Oh, please ask Umi for a mojito. Please. And let me record it.”

“No thanks,” she said, grinning and rotating her glass on the table. “I like my intestines not tied in knots from whatever she’d throw at me.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “Anyways. When we were home, we always stopped at Lady and Son’s.”

“I’m guessing this was a pub. Super English and all, right?”

“Of course! Only get entrance with a blood test to prove a proper percentage of tea in your veins.”

Their table overlooked the port’s docks, and the _Tempest_ perched amid the deceptively dusty and battered transports and cargo ships, a silvery swan among swine. The sunset– although considerably less wild than before the vault’s activation– flooded the nearby scrubland and crags in pomegranate and neon orange and citrine. Fancy cocktail colors. The air hung heady with the sun’s glare, the residual heat of the day, and the savage scent of whiskey. The bar, already busy as it always seemed to be, was getting crowded.

Liam was telling her about his old haunts and the awkwardness of hanging around the same pubs his old precinct did, and how this one time his HUSTL captain got into a buzzed yelling match with his old sergeant and then the drinking match that followed– she was polishing off the second drink and smiling and hooking his calf with her foot under the table. And maybe it was all the giggling between them or maybe it was the story, but he was feeling lighter in a way he hadn’t realized he’d needed.

Damn, what was he doing? Not here, right now in this moment, because this was great. Really, really good, but not because he’d had any part in it. The mild disaster on Aya. The major disaster with Verand. If nothing else, he had a talent for completely dicking up situations. What in the world was he doing here, with her, having this good of a time?

What a fucking miracle. Seriously.

Mira didn’t have to prod him more than once to get him to leave Kralla’s Song for Tartarus. He wasn’t about to act as squeamish about Kadara as Jaal or anything, but honestly he was about as squeamish about Kadara as Jaal. But, well, like. You know. She had like, eyes and stuff.

Which she had roving over the density of dancers lit by strobe lights in pulsing rhythms, her hands fiddling with a glass. He nudged her thigh with his knee, sidling in and letting his arm rest against hers on the aluminum table top they stood at.

“C’mon,” he said. “Your turn.”

“Okay, okay,” she said, putting down her drink and calling his nudge with her own hip check. Heat raced along his side where they touched. “My friend and I used to do a thing. If someone asked us to dance, they had to do at least one song with the other. Aela was turian, so if the person was interested in either of us, chances were the other wasn’t their type. And they weren’t worth our time if they were too impatient for that.”

He snorted and took a sip from his drink. “I could see that.”

“What?” she said, a slow smile stretching across her face. “ _What_?”

“Just wondering,” he said. “You ever think about what if we met before?”

“Maybe? I guess?”

“Like, I have a feeling you wouldn’t have given me the time of day,” he smiled.

He reached out to sweep a brown lock from her forehead. She tilted her face into his fingers.

“Hmm,” she hummed, like she was actually thinking. “And I have a feeling you’re digging for something.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Is that what’s happening?”

“Yeah, _pretty_ sure,” she told him, that short nose and crazy perfect smile washed blue by sudden strobes. “I’m feeling generous, though–”

“I _do_ like when you’re feeling generous.”

She flushed and dug her knuckles into his appendix area, the bite of the retaliation somewhat diminished by her fingers catching and lingering in his waistband loops.

“Maybe, just _maybe_ , if we met before I would have given you a free pass past Aela.”

He laughed. “Didn’t realize that was an option.”

“Yeah, _sometimes_.”

“Sometimes, huh?”

She laughed, spiking his heart rate in the best way possible. And her fingers were still holding his belt loop, his hips getting tugged with every little movement. What was it about viscous and dark whiskey in the shadows of a club’s corner table with heavy music buffeting and drowning them– what was it about all that that made him sort of light and bodiless and mesmerized by all these little things. He was suddenly made of gauze with his head gone all swimmy, floating along a sea of small touches and words.

She looked up at him for a moment. Her smile shifted and her hand moved up to the small of his back as she leaned against him.

“Hey,” she said. “You okay?”

He blinked at her. “What?”

“Are you okay?”

Then he realized he hadn’t remembered the sight and sound of her hitting the deck of the Archon’s ship once since they’d left the _Tempest_. He swallowed. Was this a distraction for him? He didn’t think it was all him, but judging from the look in her face and the warmth between them it was _enough_ of him to catch in his throat.

“I think,” he said, reaching out to boop her nose. “We came out here for you to get hammered. And you haven’t goosed me even once. No way we can call this a success yet.”

She laughed, and tossed back her current drink. She nudged him again.

“Okay, okay. I’m gonna need a couple more of these, sweetcheeks.”

“Holy shit. Sweetcheeks? Maybe I need to cut you off.”

“Nope.”

Several whiskeys and beers later, Mira completely lost any smidgen of ability to remain vertical. Liam called the outing a success, having not been mugged or anything once and her not forcing him to inflict the horribleness of his dancing on Kadara. He closed out their tab, hoisted a giggly and limb-flinging pathfinder on his back, and slogged out of Tartarus with Mira yelling into the void of over-bass’ed music, something about “peace” and “bitches.”

He ignored the reek and druggies of the slums in favor of the pleasant fuzz in his head and the feel of Mira’s weight on his back, her arms clutching his shoulders. Trotting around filthy puddles, he did his best not to jostle her too much. And not wipe out cartoon-style in oily mud; he wasn’t as far gone as her, but he’d been throwing them back, too.

“Hey, could you hold that!” Liam called as they got to the elevator with someone entering ahead of them.

The slightly rust-stained and bowed-in elevator doors whined as they remained open and they jogged in.

Liam exhaled, turning. “Thanks, man– oh. Vidal.”

“Hello, Kosta,” Reyes Vidal said without batting an eye. “Pathfinder.”

The smuggler slash Charlatan slash whatever looked immaculate and thoroughly sober, eyeing them with mild amusement as he pressed the elevator’s up button. The tiny steel can of a room was grated and smelled horribly of mystery dreadfullness, and it had a bit of an alarming vibration when it moved. Liam felt Mira shifting by his ear.

“Oh,” she said. “You.”

Reyes’s brow rose. Liam’s, too. She was usually so polite. Even to sketchy liar mcliarson sketch-sketchingtons like Vidal.

“You two seem to have had an adorable night,” Vidal chuckled.

“How would you know?” Mira said.

“This?” he said, gesturing up and down at them. “Very picture of adorable.”

Mira shifted again, making Liam grapple a bit with her legs. “Well, of _cooourse_. Ye- _eaah_.”

Liam snorted. She wiggled, the press of her weight nearly distracting him from suppressing his chuckles.

“What?” she demanded. Except she was hammered and not watching her voice like she normally did, her vowels undulating and petulant.

“You,” he laughed.

“What me?”

“You’re either the happiest or the whiniest drunk ever. You don’t ever have an inbetween.”

“That’s not true.”

(Except it was like: that’s not truuuUUuuue.)

“It is too!” Liam said. “You know what it is? You sound like one of those girls at bars that travelled in like, tiger packs and were super intimidating.”

“I don’t think tigers came in _packs_ ,” Vidal said.

They ignored him.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mira stated, over-annunciating carefully.

Liam laughed again. “It’s true, isn’t it? You were one of those intimidating, bar-hopping, badass, like, bad girls.”

She was quiet for a long moment. Her warm alcohol-laden breath tickled the hairs on the nape of his neck. He got sort-of hyper aware of the hot patch where she clung to him, and the way the side of her face grazed his neck.

“So what are you gonna do,” she said, low and pretty clearly. “Take me upstairs and show me how to behave?”

Liam froze.

“ _O_ -kay!” he burst out, his voice breaking and pitching like it hadn’t in years. “Yep. You win. You, uh, you– you definitely win that one.”

He sounded like a salarian on helium. Does helium work the same way for them? Nevermind. Not important.

Vidal was mashing the elevator button rapidly. “Is this broken? Why is it not moving faster?”

Liam shifted, grappling with Mira’s legs. He shifted again, trying to simultaneously get a better grip on his turtle shell slash pathfinder and shuffle awkwardly up against the grated wall.

“Liam– what are you–” she started.

She squawked when he suddenly tilted forward, her tilting with him. He leaned against the railing and fumbled his hold on her.

“ _Liam_ –”

“I, uh,” he said. “Yeah, so I’m definitely popping a boner.”

Vidal’s button mashing sped up furiously. “This damn thing is broken. All the taxes I pay, and the damn elevator’s broken.”

“ _Liam_.”

“What?  You– You said the thing and just, y’know–”

“Wait,” Mira said. She sort of uprighted herself suddenly from the downward stoop Liam had them in. “Should I–”

Liam weirdly skipped. “No, don’t– _The center of mass_!”

She squawked again as she plummeted from Liam’s hands, and the rickety tin can elevator groaned as she thumped against the floor and wall.

“Awh, fuck!”

“Holy shit, Mira, are you okay?”

“No!” she said. She stared, eyes wide with horror, up at him in tangle of her own limbs, awkwardly wedged up in the corner with her hands at the back of her head. “No, I am not okay!”

“Oh god, holy shit, I am so sorry–”

“My head. My back. My ass!”

Wincing, she sort of bellowed and _aargh_ ’d as she scrabbled upright. Liam crouched with awkward hover-hands hover-handing around her.

“I’m really, really sorry–”

The elevator slung their stomachs as it finally halted, the doors screeching open. Vidal pretty much sprinted out the door.

“Well, that was an experience, Kosta, Pathfinder,” he said with a hasty wave. “Have some sort of an evening, farewell!”

After a generous helping of fussing and complaining, SAM coolly reassured them that Mira would have some bruises from the fall, but nothing serious. No need to tempt Lexi’s wrath by waking her with their drunk asses. Mira finally got tired of feeling pitiful on the floor of the Kadaran slums elevator, and Liam finally stopped apologizing for his very existence, so they were able to hobble together back on board the _Tempest_. She decided to quit in the storage bay, dropping onto a crate and cradling her head for a weirdly long moment. He managed to shuffle her into the storage room and onto the couch.

She stretched out on the sofa, grumbling quietly to herself as Liam carefully squeezed underneath her, letting her head rest across his lap. He exhaled and sank into the cushions for a moment. He closed his burning eyes against the dim shadows of the silent ship. Then, with his own quiet grumbles, he fumbled at the crate used as a side table for asprin and water, plying both himself and a sleepy Mira with them.

“Kosta,” SAM intoned.

He scrunched his nose, setting aside the asprin. “Yeah?”

“Ryder has an incoming call from the _Hyperion_. Her brother. Should I reject it?”

Liam exhaled. “No, nope. I can take it.”

Weeks earlier, when she said her brother was her best friend, she wasn’t kidding.

She didn’t quite take up all of the QE comm system’s processors, all day, every day– but it was a near thing. She spent a lot of time at the ops table, a connection to the _Hyperion_ med bay running for hours as she fiddled with AVP or looked over reports from APEX. Forta making comments. Mostly unhelpful but generally funny. Generally.

“Hey, Forta,” Liam said.

“Hey!” Forta said, smiling from the storage room’s tv screen. “Liam! Annnd, Mira– Oh. Am I interrupting? I can–”

“No, nono,” Liam interrupted. “No, she’s drunk. We’re on Kadara right now.”

“Oh, good. ‘Cause I was wondering why you’d answer a call– I mean, I like you Liam, but, like, _total_ judgment–”

“Good to know, Forta,” Liam said. “What’s up?”

“Oh, nothing much. I was just bored. Look, I’ve mistimed this– it’s morning here, and you look kinda pooped, so I’ll just–”

He actually didn’t feel all that tired anymore, with the call clearing some of the fog in his head. He kept Forta on the line, chatting for a while. Conversations with the Ryder brother usually involved a good portion of complaining about physical therapy and feeling like a limp noodle twenty-four seven. Then the surprisingly mild passive-aggressive comments about how jealous he was about the total four bars in Heleus he hadn’t been to (Carlyle had already had him barred [pun! yay!] from the Vortex before he’d even woke up).

While they talked, they turned on a video game. Also an excellent use of the QE comms. It was a dusty low-res remake of an already terrible early Blasto game, but their shared rage at the unfairness of the wonky controls and map design was made hilarious by the way they had to fury-whisper when Mira mumbled at them when they got loud.

Liam did his best to use his controller up at chest height, avoiding jostling her on his lap.

“Aaargh,” Forta fury-whispered after losing all his lives spontaneously for the sixth time. “Dammit damn, dammit–”

“I’m not doing that,” Liam fury-whispered-laughed. “Blasto’s moving, but my controller’s not responding. It’s a ghost, this game is haunted.”

“I know, it’s great!”

“Now he’s just doing tentacle donuts. Oh god, I’d pay good credits to see a real hanar do that.”

They giggled together for a good while, letting the game run and watching Blasto’s mysterious shenanigans. Until the night caught up with Liam, and he started popping his jaw with yawns.

“Think I’m tapping out, man,” Liam said.

“Okay,” Forta said, his voice only vaguely tinny over the room’s speakers. “Sweet dreams!”

“Happy physical training!”

“Ugh, don’t remind me,” Forta said. He paused, keeping the connection live. “Uh. Actually, uhm. Could we talk some more?”

“Sure?” Liam said, carefully stretching out to drop his controller on the crate beside the couch. Mira mumbled, so he smoothed a hand over her hair. “What’s up?”

“Uuuh, sooo,” Forta said, reminding Liam distinctly of his sister. “I guess, firstly, thanks for letting me complain all the time. And, uh. I gotta admit something. When we left the Milky Way, I knew, y’know, that Mira had some reservations about all this.”

Liam kept quiet, still brushing over her hair with his fingers. ‘All this’ was a mild phrasing for, you know, _all this_.

“I dunno,” Forta continued. “I mean, I feel bad. I knew about it, and I have to admit I didn’t do all that much to fix it. I was more worked up about all the adventure and whatever in Andromeda. I’m scared I kind of steamrolled her. Ironic, really, seeing as how it all ended up.”

He paused over the comm link, a shrug in his voice.

“I guess I feel bad about not feeling worse about it back then. And then–” Forta stopped, letting the silence and hesitation into his voice. They’d left the game going with Blasto still ramming himself mindlessly into walls. Neither of them went to turn it off and relink the vid transmission.

Forta continued. “And then Dad died. I couldn’t be there for her. I hate– I hate thinking she was alone out there, forced to take on all of Dad’s shit. I know she puts on a face for it, doesn’t let on. But I know her. I know none of this could have been easy. She’s not the type to take on all that. She didn’t even want to be here. Not really. And then Dad–”

He was getting a thickness in his voice, in the unsteady cadence of his uncertain words. Poor Forta. Liam knew he felt helpless and useless back on the Nexus. That he _wanted_ all the responsibility and hard work. Even though he had enough on his plate, both emotionally and physically. And yet he was still worrying about his sister. Jeez, the Ryder twins. They were both so… amazing. Liam felt his own throat get all thick and scratchy.

“But like,” Forta said tightly. “I can tell, you know, since I woke up and she’s known you– I can tell she’s different. Like, before I just can’t imagine her getting called something like ‘Pathfinder’ and it fitting so well. She’s more confident, and, just, like–”

He choked and snuffled, very clearly beginning to cry. Liam brought a hand to his trembling lips and burning eyes.

“Oh, man,” Liam gasped. “Man, you can’t– You don’t how lucky I am–”

“No, no, man,” Forta whuffed. “I totally can tell. You’ve been good for her. Thank you for being so supportive–”

“Forta, no, really. I– I’m the one that really needed her support. I mean, you have no idea how much of a nut I’ve been, and she just–” His chest clenched sharply. “ _Shit, I just love her so much_ –”

“Oh, man, Liam– you– you…”

The room filled with the wet sniffling and pitiful exclamations of the pair of them. Lots of sobbed ‘Man, you’re the best’ and ‘No, you’re the best’ and such, going back and forth as the pixel-y figure of Blasto jerked about in a vaguely unsettling manner. After a while of this, they calmed down to tearful hiccups.

“By the way,” Forta sniffed. “You gotta come see me soon. I need a haircut, and I know you were doing it for me while I was in the coma. It was, like, perfect when I woke up, and now Mira leaves it too long–”

This set off Forta again, his hiccups going sob-y again. And subsequently Liam got started again, too.

“She wasn’t supposed to tell you that!”

He was so distracted with all the feelings that he nearly jumped out his skin when Mira jerked in his lap, a flailing arm striking up at his chest.

“Liam,” she groaned, eyed clenched. “Go back to sleep. Shit.”

She tossed about for a second before settling back down with her arms encircling his waist and squeezing tightly. Her face dug into his side, her breath warm over his shirt.  Fondness swept over him as he sat there, a little shuddery from post-crying hiccups.

Forta managed a good-bye, and the comm link went dark, Blasto’s inanity mercifully ended. Liam sat for a long time in the dark storage room, intruded upon only by the perpetual ambient lighting of cargo slipping through the door gaps and past the small window’s coverings. Tears drying on his cheeks, he caressed her hair with his heart thumping overloud and his chest tender with an abundance of warmth.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading~


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